What Are Hurricanes?
Hurricanes are large, swirling storms. They produce winds of 119 kilometers per hour (74 mph) or higher. That's faster than a cheetah, the fastest animal on land. Winds from a hurricane can damage buildings and trees.
Hurricanes form over warm ocean waters. Sometimes they strike land. When a hurricane reaches land, it pushes a wall of ocean water ashore. This wall of water is called a storm surge. Heavy rain and storm surge from a hurricane can cause flooding.
Once a hurricane forms, weather forecasters predict its path. They also predict how strong it will get. This information helps people get ready for the storm.
There are five types, or categories, of hurricanes. The scale of categories is called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. The categories are based on wind speed.
Category 1: Winds 119-153 km/hr (74-95 mph) - faster than a cheetah
Category 2: Winds 154-177 km/hr (96-110 mph) - as fast or faster than a baseball pitcher's fastball
Category 3: Winds 178-208 km/hr (111-129 mph) - similar, or close, to the serving speed of many professional tennis players
Category 4: Winds 209-251 km/hr (130-156 mph) - faster than the world's fastest rollercoaster
Category 5: Winds more than 252 km/hr (157 mph) - similar, or close, to the speed of some high-speed trains

What Are the Parts of a Hurricane?
Eye: The eye is the "hole" at the center of the storm. Winds are light in this area. Skies are partly cloudy, and sometimes even clear.
Eye wall: The eye wall is a ring of thunderstorms. These storms swirl around the eye. The wall is where winds are strongest and rain is heaviest.
Rain bands: Bands of clouds and rain go far out from a hurricane's eye wall. These bands stretch for hundreds of miles. They contain thunderstorms and sometimes tornadoes.

What Makes Hurricanes Form?
One ingredient is warm water. Warm ocean waters provide the energy a storm needs to become a hurricane. Usually, the surface water temperature must be 26 degrees Celsius (79 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher for a hurricane to form.
The other ingredient is winds that don't change much in speed or direction as they go up in the sky. Winds that change a lot with height can rip storms apart.

How Are Hurricanes Named?
There can be more than one hurricane at a time. This is one reason hurricanes are named. Names make it easier to keep track of and talk about storms.
A storm is given a name if it becomes a tropical storm. That name stays with the storm if it goes on to become a hurricane. (Tropical disturbances and depressions don't have names.)
Each year, tropical storms are named in alphabetical order. The names come from a list of names for that year. There are six lists of names. Lists are reused every six years. If a storm does a lot of damage, its name is sometimes taken off the list. It is then replaced by a new name that starts with the same letter.

How Does a Storm Become a Hurricane?
A hurricane starts out as a tropical disturbance. This is an area over warm ocean waters where rain clouds are building.
A tropical disturbance sometimes grows into a tropical depression. This is an area of rotating thunderstorms with winds of 62 km/hr (38 mph) or less.
A tropical depression becomes a tropical storm if its winds reach 63 km/hr (39 mph).
A tropical storm becomes a hurricane if its winds reach 119 km/hr (74 mph).

Pretty informative, please keep posting on such informative topics. Thanks

But why keep in the list names that pertain to people, for eg. "Harvey" ? Why not names of objects OR even better to devise a program that randomly combines letters/words and generates a name.

Harvey is only supposed to be Specter !

How terrible those people must feel !

__________________
Regards,
P.R.

How do hurricanes get their names?

Ever wonder how hurricanes get their names? And why do hurricanes have names at all? Meteorologists long ago learned that naming tropical storms and hurricanes helps people remember the storms, communicate about them more effectively, and so stay safer if and when a particular storm strikes a coast. These experts assign names to hurricanes according to a formal list of names that is approved of prior to the start of each hurricane season. The U.S. National Hurricane Center started this practice in 1950. Now, the World Meteorological Organization generates and maintains the list of hurricane names. Find out more about hurricane names below.

How and why did hurricanes first begin receiving names? While people have been naming major storms for hundreds of years, most hurricanes were originally designated by a system of latitude-longitude numbers, which was useful to meteorologists trying to track these storms. Unfortunately, this system was confusing to people living on coasts seeking hurricane information.

In 1950, a formal practice for storm naming was first developed for the Atlantic Ocean by the U.S. National Hurricane Center. At that time, storms were named according to a phonetic alphabet (e.g., Able, Baker, Charlie) and the names used were the same for each hurricane season; in other words, the first hurricane of a season was always named “Able,” the second “Baker,” and so on.

In 1953, to avoid the repetitive use of names, the system was revised so that storms would be named after female names. By doing this, the National Weather Service was mimicking the habit of Naval meteorologists, who named the storms after women, much as ships at sea were traditionally named for women.

In 1979, the system was revised again to include both female and male hurricane names.

When does a storm receive a name? Tropical storms are given names when they display a rotating circulation pattern and wind speeds of 39 miles per hour. A tropical storm develops into a hurricane when wind speeds reach 74 miles per hour.

What are “hurricane name lists?” Lists of hurricane names have been developed for many of the major ocean basins around the world. Today, there are six lists of hurricane names in use for Atlantic Ocean storms. These lists rotate, one each year. That means the list of this year’s hurricane names will come up again six years from now. There’s an exception to this practice, however. The names of hurricanes that are particularly damaging are retired for legal and historical reasons. For example, the use of the name Katrina was retired in 2005 following the devastating impact that Hurricane Katrina had on New Orleans.

Atlantic hurricane names for the 2017 season are: Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Don, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harvey, Irma, Jose, Katia, Lee, Maria, Nate, Ophelia, Philippe, Rina, Sean, Tammy, Vince, and Whitney. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30.

Eastern North Pacific hurricane names for the 2017 season are: Adrian, Beatriz, Calvin, Dora, Eugene, Fernanda, Greg, Hilary, Irwin, Jova, Kenneth, Lidia, Max, Norma, Otis, Pilar, Ramon, Selma, Todd, Veronica, Wiley, Xina, York, and Zelda. The eastern North Pacific hurricane season runs from May 15 to November 30.
Hurricanes in other ocean basins around the world, which are called tropical cyclones, are also given names.

Bottom line: Hurricanes are given names according to a formal system that is managed by the World Meteorological Organization.

__________________
“What we need in this country today is more courage and more belief in the things that we have.”- Thomas J. Watson

Understood the Bottom Line.

WMO's system is exactly what I'm questioning. Why don't they instead develop a system that generates name not related to humans? Eg. redA, black123, pen-down, blank-up, black-pop....sounds absurd? Well, giving the name of a human sounds equally absurd to me - personal opinion. But who said the name has to make any sense....clearly all the Katrina(s) and all the Harvey(s) got nothing to do with hurricanes. Or best keep it simple like oct-A-2K17, oct-B-2K17, oct-C-2K17, and so on! Why not ?

__________________
Regards,
P.R.

No. There are sometimes when its not one hurricane in a month or a season causing damage on land and sea. If we take recent example of Irma & Nate in Americas which happened in a spans of few days, one after the other. The hurricanes were initially named after females names between 1953 to 1978 but after that male names were also added. If more than 21 hurricanes occur during a season, the additional storms are assigned letters of the Greek Alphabets. What I've understood form this practice naming after males & female names is more easy, convincing and comprehensive than to name them as oct-A-2K17, oct-B-2K17, oct-C-2K17, etc.

__________________
“What we need in this country today is more courage and more belief in the things that we have.”- Thomas J. Watson

How are all those names convincing? What is sooo "Katrina" about a hurricane? or "Harvey" or "Irma" ?

To sum up, it gives a disastrous association to the name. For sure, people wouldn't want to give their babies those names after they become common association with hurricanes. Those already with the names must often be reminded of the terrible incidents. How very unfortunate !

Also, I don't understand why they first started with female names only. What were they thinking or trying to imply !

WMO must consider a change in system.

Regards,

__________________
Regards,
P.R.

Tropical Storm Emily surprised Florida without much warning on Monday. By Tuesday, Emily had been downgraded from a “tropical storm” to a “depression,” which meant it was time for internet jokes about Emily and her feelings.

Although the World Meteorological Organization now names hurricanes after men and women, storm names weren’t always so equally divided by gender. From roughly 1953 to 1979, U.S. hurricanes and tropical storms were actually only named after women. This week’s conversation around Emily offers a peek into why that changed.

For at least 150 years, storm names were “fraught with racism and sexism, personal preferences and vendettas,” reports Atlas Obscura. “[T]heir names have also been borrowed from places and saints, wives and girlfriends, and disliked public figures.”

Although there was plenty of precedent for naming storms after both women and men, the U.S. decided in the early 1950s to settle on a system that only used female names. It’s not entirely clear why, but the maritime tradition of referring to the ocean as a woman may have played a factor.

Once these storms took on female names, weathermen began talking about them as if they were women. They used sexist clichés to describe their behavior—saying that this one was “temperamental,” or that another was “teasing” or “flirting” with a coastline.

Understandably, female meteorologists and feminists activists weren’t impressed.

One of these dissenters was a Roxcy Bolton, the Florida feminist “credited with founding the nation’s first rape treatment center and who helped persuade national weather forecasters not to name tropical storms after only women,” according to her New York Times obituary (Bolton died earlier in May 2017). “Women, Ms. Bolton said at the time, ‘deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster.’”

Campaigns by Bolton and other women eventually persuaded the U.S. to start using male names again in 1979, but it didn’t happen without a fight. Some argued that male-named hurricanes wouldn’t be as feared as ones with female names—which is actually the opposite of how people react to hurricane names today, a study last year found.

But old habits die hard. Even years after U.S. stopped giving storms exclusively female names, a Washington Post editorial lamented in 1986 that “many of the male names don’t convey either the romance or the urgency that circumstances might warrant.” And in Bolton’s NYT obituary this year, the male author still described her—in the very first line—as a “tempestuous Florida feminist.”

Published in History on August 1, 2017.

__________________
“What we need in this country today is more courage and more belief in the things that we have.”- Thomas J. Watson