14 DAY TRIAL // Hurricane names remain in people's memory, proportionally to the disaster they have caused, but who exactly chooses these names and by what criteria?
Even if Fiona and Earl seem very simple and common names, the whole hurricane-naming process has a rather long and far-from-simple history.
Data from NOAA says that at first, hurricanes were given the names of the saints who were celebrated on the day they occurred, like in 1825, where hurricane Santa Ana hit on July 26, the day of Saint Anne.
And if two hurricanes happen to strike the same day, the second one was given a suffix, like for Hurricane San Felipe, that struck Puerto Rico on September 13, 1876, followed by another storm on September 13, 1928, named Hurricane San Felipe II.
After that, latitude-longitude positions names were used,but it became too confusing for radio communication transmissions, so, in 1951, the United States changed the system with one based on the phonetic alphabet, just like the military's.
Names like Alpha, Baker or Charlie also proved to be confusing, so in 1953, the hurricane names were given by the NOAA’s National Hurricane Center.
Even though at the beginning all names were female, with the first hurricane named Maria - after the heroine of the 1941 novel "Storm" by George Rippey Stewart, “in a very wise move, men's names were introduced in 1979, and are now rotated with women's names," said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesperson for the National Hurricane Center, in an interview granted to Life's Little Mysteries.
Today, hurricane names are established by the World Meteorological Organization headquartered in Geneva, an institution in charge of updating the six weather regions of the world.
The National Hurricane Center created six lists of hurricane names, for the Atlantic tropical storms, that are voted and updated by the WMO, through an international voting committee.
And as NOAA says, hurricanes affect several nations and are followed by people and weather services all over the world, the lists have French, Spanish, Dutch and English names, and are also in permanent rotation - the 2010 name list will be used again in 2016.
However, these lists do change, mainly because of devastating storms like 2005's Katrina, whose name will be voted inappropriate or not before being used again.
If a named is no longer part of a list, another one that begins with the same letter is voted and takes its place.
Know that the names for this year's hurricanes include Gaston, Otto, Shary and Virginie.