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| Hurricane Tomas passes over Jamaica on 5th November 2010. |
Hurricanes Igor and Tomas have been sent to the history books, relegated for the destruction they wrought in last year’s Atlantic hurricane season.
We’ve been naming large storms for over a
century, to make their identification easier, but it’s a system so
successful that names like Igor and Thomas sometimes have to be thrown
away.
Until
the middle of the last century hurricanes were often christened with
the name of an associated event, such as the names of boats that they
damaged, or the public holiday that they were spotted on. Official
naming crept in from the 1940s, but even then the practice took time to
spread.
Most
tropical regions name their storms alphabetically, and the Atlantic
naming system, to which Igor and Tomas belonged, is no exception; here
there are six lists of names, with one list used every year. But with
only six lists, names come back quickly, and that’s the problem. Take
hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005; six years on few
of us will have forgotten the images of that stricken city. Next year
though the 2005 list will be in use again. For those whose homes and
lives were destroyed the prospect of another Hurricane Katrina is
unimaginable. So in 2006 the World Meteorological Organisation’s
Hurricane Centre announced that Katrina, along with the names of four
other storms, would be removed from the list. Next year the first
Hurricane Katia might appear with most of us unaware of its former
incarnation.
Meanwhile,
the people of Newfoundland are re-building after Hurricane Igor, and
Jamaica, Haiti, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and their Caribbean
neighbours will continue the cleanup after Hurricane Tomas. Three weeks
ago, those names too were struck from the list, but their legacy
remains. All will be hoping that their replacements, Ian and Tobias,
go somewhere else in 2016.
Text copyright: Christopher Lee, 2011 - First published 5th April 2011)
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