The Atlantic tropical storm season is in full swing, bringing destruction and unpredictability and scientific debate over whether storms are worse than they used to be. Given these more pressing concerns, you might think that naming storms would be the easy part. You'd be wrong.

According to the National Hurricane Center, "experience shows that the use of short, distinctive given names in written as well as spoken communications is quicker and less subject to error than the older more cumbersome latitude-longitude identification methods." Seems simple enough, but it's a bit too simple. As AccuWeather columnist Katrina Voss said several years ago, "Perhaps by naming ... we are expressing our desire to control, or at best to understand, nature."

Voss is onto something there. Maybe the need for control explains why, during the mid-20th century, people grew dissatisfied with how storms were given arbitrary names. Nature's arbitrary enough as it is. So the NHC implemented the first modern naming system, using alphabetically ordered names for each successive storm.

However, the names all belonged to women — which, depending on your perspective, is either offensive to women or unfair to men, who deserve an equal shot at eponymous carnage. In 1979, the NHC split the names equally between the sexes.

The politics didn't end there. Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Leecomplained in 2003 that storm names were too white. "All racial groups should be represented," she said, and asked officials to "try to be inclusive of African-American names." (One would expect Jackson-Lee to be pleased with naming conventions in other regions of the world. The central North Pacific will eventually experience storms named Keoni and Walaka; the Western north Pacific could be hit by Hurricane Fung-Wong.)

Other gripes have less to do with racial sensitivity than curmudgeonliness. "We are now naming things that I would not have named when I was the director even back in the '70s and '80s," said Neil Frank, a former TV meteorologist, to a Miami station. Frank ostensibly left out how he used to walk 5 miles each way through the storms just to get to work.

For now, six lists of names are used in the Atlantic, one for each year in a six-year cycle, with the names of especially severe storms retired to ensure their place in history. This year has already seen storms named Ana, Bill and Claudette, with Danny and Erika after that on the horizon. If names run out in a given year, they are drawn from a non-alphabetical list of 24 Greek-letter names, which in New Testament fashion begins with Alpha and ends with Omega.

No contingency plan exists beyond Hurricane Omega. But if we ever need one, names will be the least of our problems.
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Image: NOAA*

**See Also:

• Hurricane's Deep-Ocean Roar Sounds Its Strength
• Hurricane Gustav Post-Mortem: 'The Bullet Dodged Us'
• Hurricane-Killing, Space-Based Power Plant

Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and reportorial outtakes, Wired bet365体育赛事 on Twitter.