Hurricanes: What's in A Name?

By: Surfline

The custom of giving names to tropical cyclones began in Australia in the early 1900s in order to reduce confusion in communicating forecasts to the general public. A typically boisterous Aussie forecaster assigned names of unpopular political figures to storms so he could refer to them as "wandering aimlessly around the Pacific" or "causing great distress among the populace."

The trend caught on in the states during World War II, as meteorologists for our armed forces named hurricanes after their wives or girlfriends, hopefully not for the same reasons as the earlier Australian. In the early '50s, we switched to the phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie, etc.) before returning to an all female revue by decade's end. With the '70s came the Equal Rights Movement, earning men equal billing on the storm front.

Each of the world's seven ocean basins follows its own system of identification. Most still with alternating male/female designations, but in the Northwest Pacific, a new naming scheme was adopted in 2000, whereby proper names were generally replaced with Asian terms for animals, birds, flowers, and even foods. Meanwhile in the unimaginative Northern Indian Ocean, tropical cyclones remain nameless. It's only a matter of time before the christening of storms becomes corporate business in America, and we're forced to listen as forecasters remind us that our season's best swell arrived courtesy of Hurricane HoJo, with locations at several major surfing destinations as well as along evacuation routes from many cities.