Hurricanes are such a normal part of tropics season that it can be easy to forget that the modern convention of naming hurricanes started not long ago.
By JOE MARIO PEDERSEN | Orlando Sentinel | Published: February 15, 2021 ORLANDO, Fla. (Tribune News Service) Andrew, Katrina and Michael chances are if you’re a Floridian, reading these names conjures memories of headlines featuring devastating hurricanes. After all, the whole point of naming something is to remember it. Hurricanes are such a normal part of the tropics season that it can be easy to forget that the modern convention of naming hurricanes started not long ago. The National Hurricane Center began using a naming system to designate storms with maximum sustained winds of 39 mph or more in the Atlantic Ocean in 1979. That followed on the heels of the World Meteorological Organization’s system that began one year earlier for storms in the Pacific. The WMO came up with six years’ worth of predetermined lists of alternating male and female names in an alphabetic order.