Hurricanes may be going Greek as bumper crop of storms continues

HURRICANE Alpha? Tropical Storm Epsilon? Before this year’s frantic Atlantic hurricane season is out, TV forecasters and coastal residents may have to break out their Greek dictionaries.

There are only four names left for tropical storms and hurricanes this year: Stan, Tammy, Vince and Wilma. After that, names switch to the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and so on through to Omega, if needed.

The Greek names have never been needed before in roughly 60 years of regularly-named Atlantic storms.

“If we get up into that league, we’ll have issues larger than naming these storms,” said Frank Lepore, spokesman for the National Hurricane Centre in Miami. “The new phrase will be hurricane fatigue. Let’s coin that right now.”

So far this season, there have been 17 named storms. Forecasters expect a total of 18 to 21 by the time the six-month season ends on November 30. But with conditions in the atmosphere and Atlantic ripe for storm development, there could be more.

Only once since records began in 1851 have there been 21 tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic. That was in 1933 when forecasters didn’t regularly name storms.

What’s more, a storm name is retired if it causes widespread damage and deaths. So if there is a deadly Hurricane Alpha, what is it replaced with?

“We don’t know. It will go to the Swahili alphabet or something else,” joked Jim Lushine, severe weather expert at the National Weather Service in Miami.

That decision would be up to an international committee of the World Meteorological Organisation, a United Nations agency in Geneva that maintains the worldwide lists for hurricane names.

Currently, there are six separate 21-name lists and each of them is used every six years in a rotation. They don’t include names that begin with q, u, x, y and z because there aren’t enough names starting with those letters.

Female names were used starting in 1953 in a list created by the National Hurricane Centre. The first one was called Tropical Storm Alice.

That was considered biased against women, so men’s names were added in 1978 in the Pacific and a year later in the Atlantic.