If you've ever wondered where hurricanes get their names and why those names change year by year, AccuWeather's Geoff Cornish has answers for you.
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00:00What's in a name? Some of you may wonder how do these hurricane names get assigned and who picks them and who maintains the list and so forth.
00:09Sometimes names come back and they seem kind of familiar as if we've had them before.
00:13The World Meteorological Organization maintains a rotating list of names.
00:18In fact, different rotating lists for each oceanic basin.
00:21East Pacific, different from the West Pacific where there are typhoons, different from the Atlantic.
00:25And the Atlantic and East Pacific lists are rotated on a six year repeating cycle.
00:29So actually most of the names of this year's storms we've seen before back in 2018.
00:34And they're going to be back again in 2030 unless they're fierce enough to be retired.
00:38We may not see another barrel. We'll have to see what they decide to do in March.
00:43The World Meteorological Organization decides on the retirement of some names if they're extremely costly, deadly or high impact.
00:51One of these examples was Florence back six years ago.
00:54You might recall that was the tremendous flood producer that we've been talking about.
00:57We just had the six year anniversary of that.
00:59That was the last time Florence will ever be used.
01:01So Francine became the new F storm in this particular list.
01:05And that list will be repeated again in 2030.
01:08There have been many I names that have been retired.
01:11In fact, as we get into the full stride of the hurricane season, by the time we hit the letter I,
01:16we're several storms into the season, typically in September.
01:19And that is when we often see our fiercest of storms.
01:23So there have been more I named storms retired than any other alphabetic name.
01:27So back in the early 1900s, storms like the fiercest, one of the fiercest we've ever had was the Galveston hurricane in 1900.
01:34They were named kind of arbitrarily.
01:36The Labor Day hurricane in 1935 was a huge one.
01:40Back in 1953, they began to use an alphabetical sequence, initially using only female or women's names.
01:46Now we alternate men and women's names, male and female, since 1979.