Hurricane Name Generator

How the Hurricane / Storm Name Generator works

Hurricane name generator: how the names are built

A storm name exists so that forecasters, ships and the public can talk about two systems at once without confusion, and the conventions follow from that job: names are short, easy to say on the radio, distinct from each other in sound, and, in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific, alphabetical within a season and alternating in gender, one list per year rotating on a six-year cycle, with Q, U, X, Y and Z skipped in the Atlantic because there are too few names to fill them. A name whose storm was deadly or costly enough is retired and replaced at the next meeting, which is why no list stays the same for long. The Atlantic lists are English, Spanish and French given names in roughly the proportions of the countries on the basin; the Eastern Pacific lists lean Spanish and run the alphabet to Z; the Western Pacific typhoon list is contributed by fourteen members and is not personal names at all but words, animals, flowers, foods and places, in rotation without alphabet; the North Indian Ocean list is contributed by thirteen countries in turn and is likewise mostly words; and the European winter storm lists, kept by the British, Irish and Dutch services, are alphabetical public-nominated names that skip Q, U, X, Y and Z, with each service supplying a share. The basin select changes the pool of names to match that flavour; the convention select puts the name in the form it would be reported, Hurricane Marit, Tropical Storm Odile, Storm Bronwen for a European system, Typhoon or Super Typhoon for the Western Pacific, Cyclone or Severe Cyclonic Storm for the Indian Ocean, and a full report line with a category and a year. When an Atlantic season runs out of names it once continued into the Greek alphabet and now continues into a supplementary list, which is the same shape as the main one; the fictional basin is for an invented world and uses names that sound like storm names without belonging to any language's real list.

Every name here is invented or drawn from the general stock of given names and words, not copied from the current rotating lists, so a result is not a real forecast and a coincidence with a past storm is possible, since real lists are made of common given names too; this page also does not know which names are retired. The forms are those of the official bulletins, but the categories, years and months are random and mean nothing.

For the ship that meets the storm, the Ship name page; for the coastal town it makes landfall on, the Town name and Fictional island pages; for the disaster film it is in, the Movie title page in the Media section; and for the weather app it appears in, the App name page in the Business section.

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