Photo Source: NOAA
Today was the first day for my intern, Corey, and we were thinking of a weather trivia question for the 6 PM news. We wanted to do something with hurricanes and he came up with the idea of asking something about hurricane name retirement. I liked it.
We looked up a website with retired hurricane names and started thinking of a trivia question. We thought Irene would end up being retired so we started looking at which letter has been retired the most. (It’s ‘C’ by the way.) I then started looking at the I-named storms and found something interesting. In the last 10 years, 6 out of those 10 I-named storms were retired. Those were Iris, Isidore, Isabel, Ivan, Ike, and Igor. Add this year, and that’s 7 of 11!
Here’s a couple more stats I found from the website (which I’ll link to at the end of this post)…
- To retire a hurricane name, “a storm [needs to be] so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for obvious reasons of sensitivity.”
- There have been 75 retired storm names since 1954. #25 was Anita in 1977. #50 was Keith in 2000. #75 was Tomas in 2010.
- Irene will likely be the first retired storm of 2011. (Although I could be wrong.)
- The year with the most retired names was 2005. Those were Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan, and Wilma.
- There were 18 years since 1954 that didn’t have a storm name retired. The latest being 2009.
- The last retired name, alphabetically, is Wilma from 2005.
- The letter with the most retirement is C. There have been 9 C-named storms retired.
Want to see the entire list of retired storm names? Check them out and the rest of the website by clicking here.
Source: NOAA/National Hurricane Center
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I follow the weather closely – I’m a runner, so need to know how to prepare weekly workouts – and have always had an interest in meterorology, following events closely. But I don’t remember Stan or Wilma. I do remember Ivan being a bad one. Anyway, I’m still mad about them switching over from all-female names. Honestly, can’t we maintain any traditions?!?!? If they were going to switch, they should have done men’s name in odd years and women’s in even ones. Would be easier to remember the storms.
Have we ever reached Z?
I like the idea of alternating years. Most people’s memories are bad enough as it is. That would have made things a lot easier.
I normally look up storms like Stan and Wilma on Wikipedia. It’s not always the most accurate source, but it is pretty good for things like storms.
We have not hit Z before because there is no Z. There’s also no Q. Once you get past W, they move on to the Greek alphabet. This happened in 2005. will show you the list for each year. Just choose it on the drop-down menu.
Thanks for the comment, by the way.
Irene last used in 05, just before Katrina, interesting.
Re: “There have been 75 retired storm names since 1954. #25 was Anita in 1977. #50 was Keith in 2000. #75 was Thomas in 2010.”
Actually, ‘Thomas’ was NOT retired in 2010, but “Tomas” was!
Thanks for the correction. I’ll fix that in the post. Force of habit to type Thomas instead of Tomas.