Today marks the end of the 2005 hurricane season. Starting tomorrow any storms will go unnamed until the 2006 storm season starts June 1st.
We’ve had a record 26 named storms. Before this year I had no idea what happened when we ran through the list of 21 Atlantic storm names — we’d never done it before.
As we all know now, after the people names, storms are named by letters of the Greek alphabet. Tropical Storm Epsilon is currently 1045 KM east-southeast of Bermuda with 70 mph winds.
It’s a good thing the season is ending. No one I’ve talked with knew off Greek alphabet deeper than Epsilon… until, of course, we get to Omega.
But, thanks to Patti, I’m ready for next season. Here’s the alphabet:
The National Weather Service says that they started naming hurricanes because human names were easier to understand and track than the old latitude/longitude method of identifying storms. I guess they don’t expect much naming confusion from December 1 through May 31.
For weather geeks, there’s more on storm names.
When I first heard about that protocol, I wondered if it’s going to be “Alpha 2005,” “2005 Alpha,” “05-Alpha” or what…I still don’t know (maybe it’s in your LJ cut).
SURELY there will be more Alphas in the future, as well as Betas, etc.
This is the first time we’ve gotten to Alpha, so who knows? The Weather Service does reuse storm names anyway. They’ve got six list of names they rotate through. If a storm is a real bad one, they’ll retire that name with another of the same letter. I’m guessing, for example, that there won’t be another Katrina.