(Newswire.net — October 9, 2016) —The National Weather Service (NWS), and its National Hurricanes Center in Miami, which determined the name of the current deadly Hurricane Matthew, will have to make a decision whether to retire the name.
Since the late seventies of the last century, the practice is to give mostly female names to hurricanes. When a storm is deemed to be particularly deadly or costly, the practice is that its name is removed from the list
Hurricane Matthew, which devastated the Caribbean, destroying more than 350,000 homes, and killing more than 800 people, is one of a few hurricane with a male name.
Among the devastating hurricanes, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was one of the five deadliest hurricanes, and Andrew, in 1992, but most of them were “deadly ladies”.
Hurricanes have names because it is easier to monitor and warn of these storms when sometimes two or more hurricanes are active at the same time.
Up to the 20th century, hurricanes were given names based on geographic location, intensity or days in which to emerge. But the Marines in World War II, during battles in the Pacific where most hurricanes form, started to give female names to the catastrophic phenomenon, these tropical storms, because they were missing their girls.
Meteorologists then continued this tradition. In 1979, the National Weather Service decided to put male names on the hurricane list in order to comply with the policy of equality between the sexes.
When they run out of pretty names, among which there are still more female and less male names, hurricanes will be named by the letters of the Greek alphabet, as Clement Wragge, the Australian pioneer of Meteorology did in the late 19th century. He named storms by the Greek alphabet and characters from Greek and Roman mythology.