Hurricanes will no longer be named after letters from the Greek alphabet.
The Hurricane Committee of the World Meteorological Organization, the weather agency of the United Nations, announced on Wednesday that “the Greek alphabet will not be used in future because it creates a distraction from the communication of hazard and storm warnings and is potentially confusing.”
Greek letters are used to name storms when the standard alphabet list gets exhausted, which has happened on only two occasions in the past 15 years, but by the committee’s estimation, this would likely happen again in the future.
Instead, the Hurricane Committee agreed to create a supplement list from of names A-Z, excluding Q and U, as well as X, Y, and Z on the Atlantic Ocean list, that will be used if the standard list runs out in a given season.
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“Names beginning with Q, U, X, Y and Z are still not common enough or easily understood in local languages to be slotted into the rotating lists,” the WMO explained in its announcement.
WMO #Hurricane Committee has retired #Dorian (2019), #Laura, #Eta and #Iota (2020) from rotating lists of Atlantic names because of the death and destruction they caused
The Greek alphabet will never be used again as it was distracting and confusing
??https://t.co/tJGn1dxT1o pic.twitter.com/Eaaockkzbq— World Meteorological Organization (@WMO) March 17, 2021
The WMO committee also said it came to a conclusion that there will be no adjustments to its official start date of the Atlantic hurricane season in 2021, which starts June 1.
In another announcement, the WMO said that the Hurricane Committee had retired the names Dorian, Laura, Eta, and Iota from the rotating lists of Atlantic tropical cyclone names “because of the death and destruction they caused” in 2019 and 2020. The WMO also said that Eta and Iota were retired specifically because those names were Greek letters and would not be used anymore, given its decision to discontinue the use of the Greek alphabet.
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The organization has retired 93 storm names since 1953, when the naming system began.
