What's in a Name?
Learn how tropical storms and hurricanes get their names.
Storms get names when they build up winds of at least 39 miles per hour. That's tropical-storm status. The names come from lists kept by the World Meteorological Organization, in Geneva, Switzerland.
There are six alphabetical lists of names for Atlantic storms. The lists are used in rotation — one list each year. Each list has 21 English, French, and Spanish names. They don't include any that begin with q, u, x, y, or z because there aren't enough names starting with those letters.
What if there are more than 21 tropical storms in a season? If that happens, names switch to the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on, but that's a very rare occurrence.
When a hurricane causes major destruction, its name may be "retired." If that happens, another name takes the place of the retired name on the list. "Katrina" was one of five names retired from the list in 2005 .
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The Weather
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Let's Find Out's Big Box of Science
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Let's Find Out's Big Box of Science
Children will explore the parts of a flower, the life cycle of a frog, different dinosaur species, and other early childhood science investigations through simple visual organizers.
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What's the History? The custom of naming storms has a long history. For several hundred years many hurricanes in the West Indies were named for the saint's day on which the storm occurred. In the late 1800's, some weather forecasters began giving women's names to tropical storms. That custom became widespread during World War II. The U.S. Weather Service officially began to name storms for women in 1953. Men's names were first included in 1978. |
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