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The traditional list of hurricane names for the year goes from A to W, and, in the very rare occurrence that the W storm has formed and there is another tropical storm out there, then the Greek letter names (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, etc. to Omega) are used (e.g., 2005 Atlantic hurricane season). Considering the activity so far (September 2020) of the Atlantic hurricane season, and that we still have two months of season (i.e., until November 30), what is the next naming list coming from (if there even is one)?

arkaia
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  • https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/20222/in-the-future-is-the-world-meteorological-organization-going-to-allow-hurricane –  Sep 19 '20 at 12:57
  • @gansub, there are potentially another 16 hurricanes/tropical storms after what that question asks. Funny that the two were asked at about the same time – arkaia Sep 19 '20 at 15:37
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    A not-qualified chemist's idea, facing a lager of gnumeric's spreadsheets: here Latin column headers run A--Z, them start by AA, AB, AC, AD ... Cambridge Crystallographic Centre's CSD database uses a six (Latin) character system potentially hosting 6^26 stem entries, too. Thus if applied to Greek, the available space of 24 slots would be extended by additional 2^24 which hopefully were much more than enough to cover many storms daily. – Buttonwood Sep 19 '20 at 20:22
  • @Buttonwood The point of this system is that the storms are easily identified by the public, making risk-related communication easier for authorities. Not sure if it would still be the case with storms named "ERGDPH" or "$\alpha\mu\zeta\epsilon\alpha\gamma$"... – Jean-Marie Prival Sep 21 '20 at 07:35
  • @Jean-MariePrival The detail to the public is important. I'm still more familiar with system with 21 (Northern Atlantic) / 24 (Northern Pacific) latin-character name lists (e.g., Irene, Katrina in 2005) and speculate(d) 21 Latin-character based names + 24 Greek ones hopefully were enough. It not like this old 1979 publication where chemists already defined all the names of elements up to #900, while (currently) only 118 are described with experimental evidence (open access, https://doi.org/10.1351/pac197951020381). – Buttonwood Sep 21 '20 at 17:01
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    Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/944/ – Mark Sep 24 '20 at 02:04
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    NHC got to the Greek list on Sept 18th. That's about a week past the climatological peak, so the season should be over halfway done. In the remaining less-than-half a season, we'd need to have 14% more than the RECORD pace we set in the first half+ of the season (24 Greek names vs 21 regular). To me it seems like asking "what would the NBA do if a game had so many overtimes\such incredible scoring that they reached the 1000s of points, how would they keep score?" They'd find a way. But such incredibly unlikely potentialities likely aren't worth the time of planning for\considering! – JeopardyTempest Oct 08 '20 at 08:22

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