How Are Hurricanes Named, What Names Are Retired?

It's a good bet your school-aged kids know more than you do — and that you know less than you thought you did — about what it takes to name Atlantic basin tropical cyclones, storms and hurricanes.

From Agnes to Wanda, here's a primer to get you started, with three charts below, based on information from the National Hurricane Center.

• The National Hurricane Center in 1953 came up with lists of names, which today are maintained and updated through an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

• There are six lists of names in rotation, recycled every six years. That means this year's list will be used again in 2018. In all, there are 21 names on each list, or 126 names altogether.

• The only time there is a change in any list is if a storm "is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitvity." That happened 24 times in the first decade of the new millenium. The second-highest decade for retired names was in the 1990's, with 15. That means 52 percent of the 75 retired names occurred from 1990 to 2009. (See chart below.)

• Should a name be retired — and that last happened in 2011, with Hurricane Irene — then at an annual meeting of the WMO committee, called to discuss many issues, the "offending name is stricken from the list and another name is selected to replace it." 

• Each list has 21 names. Should there be more than 21 named tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin in any one season, additional names will be drawn from the Greek alphabet. Such was the case with Tropical Storm Alpha and hurricanes Beta and Gamma in 2005.

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ATLANTIC NAMES

Click through for a list of Eastern North Pacific names and for a list of North Pacific names.

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RETIRED NAMES BY DECADE (Atlantic Basin)

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RETIRED NAMES BY YEAR (Atlantic Basin)