“Zeta, Eta, Theta – if you even think of me saying that – having these storms at the same time was difficult,” said Kenneth Graham, the director of the National Hurricane Center, pointing to three Greek letters that were used in succession to cite three of the last storms of the season. “People were mixing up the storms.”
Graham said the confusion was particularly evident after Hurricane Zeta hit Louisiana last year. He said he received calls from people who believed Zeta was the last letter of the Greek alphabet and were asking what the next storm would be called. In fact, Zeta is just the sixth letter of the 24-letter Greek alphabet. Omega is the last.
The World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, said its Hurricane Committee has developed a supplementary list of names that can be used instead of Greek letters when the standard list runs out at a particular station. The backup list of 21 Atlantic storm names starts with Adria, Braylen and Caridad and ends with Viviana and Will.
Like the main list of storm names, the supplemental list does not include names that begin with the letters Q, U, X, Y or Z, which authorities said were not common enough or easily understood in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese. , the languages spoken frequently in North America, Central America and the Caribbean.
“I think we kept things simple, which was not easy,” said Graham, chairman of the Hurricane Committee. “If you think of the list of names that we could choose from, it’s very easy to get to a situation where they’re very complicated or difficult to say because, remember, we’re talking English, we’re talking Spanish, we’re talking French and, in some cases, also in Portuguese. “