The practice of using names to identify tropical cyclones goes back several centuries, with storms named after places, saints or things they hit before the formal start of naming in each basin. Examples of such names are the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane (also known as the "San Felipe II" hurricane) and the 1938 New England hurricane. The system currently in place provides identification of tropical cyclones in a brief form that is easily understood and recognized by the public. The credit for the first usage of personal names for weather systems is given to the Queensland Government Meteorologist Clement Wragge, who named tropical cyclones and anticyclones between 1887 and 1907. This system of naming fell into disuse for several years after Wragge retired, until it was revived in the latter part of World War II for the Western Pacific. Over the following decades, formal naming schemes were introduced for several tropical cyclone basins, including the North and South Atlantic, Eastern, Central, Western and Southern Pacific basins as well as the Australian region and Indian Ocean.
However, there has been controversy over the names used at various times, with names being dropped for religious and political reasons. Female names were exclusively used in the basins at various times between 1945 and 2000 and were the subject of several protests. At present tropical cyclones are officially named by one of eleven meteorological services and retain their names throughout their lifetimes. Due to the potential for longevity and multiple concurrent storms, the names reduce the confusion about what storm is being described in forecasts, watches and warnings. Names are assigned in order from predetermined lists once storms have one, three, or ten-minute sustained wind speeds of more than , depending on which basin it originates in. Standards vary from basin to basin, with some tropical depressions named in the Western Pacific, while a significant amount of gale-force winds are required in the Southern Hemisphere. The names of significant tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Australian region are retired from the naming lists and replaced with another name, at meetings of the World Meteorological Organization's various tropical cyclone committees.
Background
The practice of using names to identify tropical cyclones goes back several centuries, with systems named after places, people (like Roman Catholic saints), or things they hit before the formal start of naming in each basin. Examples include the 1526 San Francisco hurricane (named after Saint Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is observed by Catholics on October 4), the 1834 Padre Ruiz hurricane (named after a then-recently deceased Catholic priest whose funeral service was being held in the Dominican Republic upon landfall there), the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane (named after Lake Okeechobee in the state of Florida, United States, where many of its effects were felt; also named the San Felipe II hurricane in the predominantly-Catholic island of Puerto Rico after a certain Saint Philip with a September 13 feast day), and the 1938 New England hurricane.
Credit for the first usage of personal names for weather is generally given to the Queensland Government Meteorologist Clement Wragge, who named tropical cyclones and anticyclones between 1887 and 1907. Wragge used names drawn from the letters of the Greek alphabet, Greek and Roman mythology and female names to describe weather systems over Australia, New Zealand and the Antarctic. After the new Australian government had failed to create a federal weather bureau and appoint him director, Wragge started naming cyclones after political figures. This naming system subsequently fell into disuse for several years after Wragge retired, until it was revived in the latter part of the Second World War. Despite falling into disuse, the naming scheme was occasionally mentioned in the press, with an editorial published in the Launceston Examiner newspaper on October 5, 1935 that called for its return. Wragge's naming scheme was also mentioned within Sir Napier Shaw's "Manual of Meteorology," which likened it to a "child naming waves". After reading about Clement Wragge, George Stewart was inspired to write a novel, Storm, about a storm affecting California which was named Maria. The book was widely read after it was published in 1941 by Random House, especially by United States Army Air Corps and United States Navy (USN) meteorologists during World War II.
Formal start of naming During the latter stages of World War II, forecasters with the United States Armed Forces (USAF) began informally naming tropical cyclones over the Pacific Ocean after their wives and sweethearts. In 1945, after the practice had become popular among forecasters who found that it reduced confusion during map discussions, the USAF formalized the scheme and started to publicly assign female names to tropical cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere and male names to those in the Southern Hemisphere. At the time, attempts were made to persuade the United States Weather Bureau (USWB) to start using female names for Atlantic hurricanes, but the bureau wanted to be seen as a serious enterprise and felt that it was "not appropriate" to name tropical cyclones while warning the United States public. As a result, the USAF started to use the Joint Army/Navy Phonetic Alphabet to name significant tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic Ocean. Over the next few years, names continued to be assigned to tropical cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere, but the practice fell into disuse within the Southern Hemisphere.
During August and September 1950, three tropical cyclones (Hurricanes Baker, Dog and Easy) occurred simultaneously and impacted the United States, which caused confusion within the media and the public. As a result, during the next tropical cyclone (Fox), Grady Norton decided to start using the names in public statements and in the seasonal summary. This practice continued throughout the season, until the system was made official before the start of the next season. During 1952, a new international phonetic alphabet was introduced, as the old phonetic alphabet was seen as too Anglocentric. This led to some confusion with what names were being used, as some observers referred to Hurricane Charlie as "Cocoa." Ahead of the following season no agreement could be reached over which phonetic alphabet to use, before it was decided to start using a list of female names to name tropical cyclones. During the season, the names were used in the press with only a few objections recorded, and as a result, public reception to the idea seemed favourable. The same names were reused during 1954 with only one change: Gilda for Gail. However, as Hurricanes Carol, Edna, and Hazel affected the populated Northeastern United States, controversy raged with several protests over the use of women's names as it was felt to be ungentlemanly or insulting to womanhood, or both. Letters were subsequently received that overwhelmingly supported the practise, with forecasters claiming that 99% of correspondence received in the Miami Weather Bureau supported the use of women's names for hurricanes.
Forecasters subsequently decided to continue with the current practice of naming hurricanes after women but developed a new set of names ahead of the 1955 season with the names Carol, Edna and Hazel retired for the next ten years. However, before the names could be written, a tropical storm was discovered on January 2, 1955, and named Alice. The Representative T. James Tumulty subsequently announced that he intended to introduce legislation that would call on the USWB to abandon its practice of naming hurricanes after women, and suggested that they be named using descriptive terms instead. Until 1960, forecasters decided to develop a new set of names each year. By 1958, the Guam Weather Center had become the Fleet Weather Central/Typhoon Tracking Center on Guam, and had started to name systems as they became tropical storms rather than typhoons. Later that year during the 1958–59 cyclone season, the New Caledonia Meteorological Office started to name tropical cyclones within the Southern Pacific. During 1959 the US Pacific Command Commander in Chief and the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided that the various US Navy and Air Force weather units would become one unit based on Guam entitled the Fleet Weather Central/Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which continued naming the systems for the Pacific basin.
1960–1990s In January 1960, a formal naming scheme was introduced for the South-West Indian Ocean by the Mauritius and Madagascan Weather Services. with the first cyclone being named Alix. Later that year, as meteorology entered a new era with the launching of the world's first meteorological satellite TIROS-1, eight lists of tropical cyclone names were prepared for use in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific basins. In the Atlantic it was decided to rotate these lists every four years, while in the Eastern Pacific, the names were designed to be used consecutively before being repeated. During December 1962, New Caledonia proposed to the third session of the World Meteorological Organisation's Regional Association V, that tropical cyclones in the region should be named using female names. Other members of the association considered using masculine Christian names to the south of the Equator, to avoid any confusion with the names used in the Northern Hemisphere. Ultimately the association decided that there was no need for a naming scheme to be introduced to the south of the Equator. However, it had no objections to members naming systems on a national basis provided that the same names were not allocated in neighbouring regions, to different cyclones. During the following year, the Philippine Weather Bureau (later reorganized into PAGASA in 1972) adopted four sets of female Filipino nicknames ending in "ng" from A to Y for use in its self-defined area of responsibility. Following the international practise of naming tropical cyclones, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology decided at a conference in October 1963 that they would start naming tropical cyclones after women at the start of the 1963–64 cyclone season. The first Western Australian cyclone was subsequently named Bessie on January 6, 1964. In 1965, after two of the Eastern Pacific lists of names had been used, it was decided to start recycling the sets of names on an annual basis like in the Atlantic.