According to the National Hurricane Centre, since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms have been named from lists originated by this organisation. They are now maintained and updated by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organisation http://www.wmo.ch.

The original name lists featured only women’s names, but in 1979, men’s names were introduced and they alternate with the women’s names. Six lists are used in rotation. Thus, the 2006 list will be used again in 2012 and the 2001 list will be used again this year.

In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames_greek.shtml: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.

If a storm forms in the off-season, it will take the next name in the list based on the current calendar date. For example, if a tropical cyclone formed on December 28, it would take the name from the previous season’s list of names. If a storm formed in February, it would be named from the subsequent season’s list of names. This was the case in January this year.

The only time that there is a change in the list is if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity. If that occurs, then at an annual meeting by the WMO committee (called primarily to discuss many other issues) the offending name is stricken from the list and another name is selected to replace it, as was the case with Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Fabian, which hit Bermuda in 2003.

According to the National Hurricane Centre, experience also 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.

These advantages are especially important in exchanging detailed storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases and ships at sea.