September 10, 2005
Just in Case You Were Worried We'd Run Out of Hurricane Names
Here we are up to "O" and the hurricane season still has a lot of punch left in it. Plus the official list only uses 21 letters in the alphabet: Q, U, X, Y and Z are left out -- why no Zelda nor Zeke? So we only have six names left for this year (Philippe, Rita, Stan, Tammy, Vince, Wilma -- watch out for Tammy). But fear not!
In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.
One of my colleagues suggested the other day that instead of boring Greek letters, they should go for double letters: Aaron, Bebe, Cece, Dede, Fifi and so on. I mean, who wants to be flattened by hurricane Beta?
Posted by Michael : September 10, 2005 12:00 AM | Science/Medicine | TechnoLinks
Slashdot
It!
With global warming, they'd better change this system. I can hear the newscasts now:
"As Hurricane Gamma continues to build in strength and approach the coast, people here wonder whether it will resemble last year's devestating Hurricane Gamma or miss land completely like Hurricane Gamma the year before last. Nobody even wants to think about the possibility of another "storm of the century" like Hurricane Gamma five years ago or Hurricane Gamma two years before that."
Why I thought you would be in favor of Beta testing , Michael. (terrible I know... but it's a slow day.)