According to NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) the Atlantic Hurricane Season started on June 1. At one time June 15 was the start date and Nov. 15 the end date. In 1965 the date was moved back two weeks to the first and extended two weeks to the end of November.

Each year is different, but the average number of named storms in the Atlantic in a season is 14, of which seven become Hurricanes. Last year there were 13 named storms and five hurricanes, the strongest being Hurricane “Melissa” which decimated Jamaica and whose name is now retired. There will never be another “Melissa”.

Originally a hurricane was named from where it made landfall. An example is the Galveston Storm of 1900, which is still the deadliest disaster in U.S. history claiming up to 12,000 lives.

During World War II the meteorologists in the Pacific started to name storms after their wives or girlfriends as a quick and easy way to reference the storms. In 1950 the U.S. weather Bureau changed the naming process to the phonetic alphabet the armed forces use (Able, Baker, Charlie, etc). That didn’t last long and they went back to naming the storms after women. Women’s rights advocates in the 1970s complained about the use of women’s names to name the hurricanes. So, even though no one had ever heard of a “himicane”, in 1978 the National Hurricane Center introduced both men’s and women’s names with the first “man” name, Hurricane Bob, in 1979. “Bob” was an average Category 2 hurricane with sustained winds of 75mph, and it did about $20 million in damages.

This year the first Atlantic storm named was “Arthur” and the first Atlantic storm in 2027 will be “Ana”. Because of its size the Pacific Ocean is broken into the Eastern Pacific and the Central Pacific. This year’s first storm was named “Amanda” in the Pacific.

There are 21 names on the list for each year arranged in alphabetical order. Why not 26? There are no storms that start with the letter “Q” or the letter “U” or “X”, or “Y” or “Z”. The National Hurricane Center website has a list of all the names to be used through 2031. Out of curiosity I looked for the name “Mark”.

It wasn’t on any of the lists. I then looked to see if “Mark” had ever been used, and it had back in 1992 in the Pacific. I looked to see if maybe the name “Mark” had been retired. Nope. As noted earlier, the name “Melissa” is now the 102nd name that has been retired along with “Bob” which was the 38th storm’s name to be retired. Other storms whose names have been retired are Andrew in 1992 that killed 17 people and did the equivalent of $65 billion in damages. Helene in 2024 killed 252 people and did $78.7 billion in damages. And then of course, there’s Katrina with $161 billion in damages and 1,392 people killed.

I’ve experienced tornados, thunderstorms, blizzards, an earthquakes, and I’ve seen water spouts out on the ocean, but I have never lived through a hurricane. I did spend the night on a small Cay in the Bahamas when a tropical storm blew across. I was staying in a small cabin on the Cay while the rest of the team was living on a boat. The storm wasn’t any worse than a strong thunderstorm here in Nebraska and when I told the Captain of the boat that he said, “Yea, but you weren’t on the boat!”