We already have Gaston on our list as the 2022 Hurricane season continues. Gaston hit Carolina in 2004. So why is that name being reused?This week in his Science 2 Go, we delve into the cycle and deprecation of hurricane names.

Each year there is a list of new hurricane season names. The list of hurricane names was chosen by the World Meteorological Organization and has been maintained by the National Hurricane Center since 1953.

Storm naming began in 1950. This was a practice developed by his NHC in which storms were named according to the phonetic alphabet and the same name was used for each hurricane season. However, the list of names rotates every six years of his life.

Hurricanes and tropical storms are quickly named when they exhibit rotating circulation patterns and wind speeds of 39 mph, and develop into hurricanes when wind speeds reach 74 mph.

The list of names will be rotated every six years until the storm becomes so severe and devastating that the WMO votes to remove the name from the rotating list and obsolete it. When a name is deprecated, it will be replaced with a new name. Obsolete, his familiar name is one…Hurricane Hugo.

What happens when you run out of names? This happens very rarely, it happened only once in 2005..but in 2020 we had to look to the Greek letters to name the storm.The 2020 season is Hurricane Iota closed the curtain.