Name Your Hurricane

Harvey. Irma. Sandy. Ike. Katrina. Andrew. Agnes. We humans have enjoyed naming storms for a long time. What;s the name of yours? Most people go through more than one.

Harvey. Irma. Sandy. Ike. Katrina. Andrew. Agnes.

They sound like names you would hear at a cocktail party in the 1950s, but we know them in a very different context. These are the names of some of the most devastating hurricanes in history -- storms whose impact  on the lives of people continue long after the clouds have parted, the floods receded and the winds died down.

We watched with horror the devastation wrought by Hurricane Harvey on the Gulf Coast last year. Interstates in Houston became surging rapids. Islands in the Caribbean like Puerto Rico lost most of their infrastructure. Harvey was soon followed by Irma, which hit the Caribbean again and then turned her wrath on Florida. The recovery from these storms is ongoing and will take years but, even then, the memories will linger.

Naming storms is something that humans have been doing for a long time. In a practical sense, storms are given these short and distinctive names as a way of reducing confusion when two or more of ...