For several hundred years many hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the particular saint’s day on which the hurricane occurred. Ivan R. Tannehill describes in his book “Hurricanes” the major tropical storms of recorded history and mentions many hurricanes named after saints. For example, there was “Hurricane Santa Ana” which struck Puerto Rico with exceptional violence on July 26, 1825, and “San Felipe” (the first) and “San Felipe” (the second) which hit Puerto Rico on September 13 in both 1876 and 1928.

Tannehill also tells of Clement Wragge, an Australian meteorologist who began giving women’s names to tropical storms before the end of the l9th century.

An early example of the use of a woman’s name for a storm was in the novel “Storm” by George R. Stewart, published by Random House in 1941, and since filmed by Walt Disney. During World War II this practice became widespread in weather map discussions among forecasters, especially Air Force and Navy meteorologists who plotted the movements of storms over the wide expanses of the Pacific Ocean.

In 1953, the United States abandoned a confusing two-year old plan to name storms by a phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie) when a new, international phonetic alphabet was introduced. That year, the United States began using female names for storms.

The practice of naming hurricanes solely after women came to an end in 1978 when men’s and women’s names were included in the Eastern North Pacific storm lists. In 1979, male and female names were included in lists for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.

The 2006 Pacific hurricane season was the most active since 2000

Despite hitting a relatively remote section of the Mexican coastline as a Category 1 hurricane, Stan’s effects were felt across the region as 49 people died in El Salvador as a result of mudslides brought on by related storms. A total of 65 people perished across the entire region as a result of Stan. Stan became the 18th named storm of an extremely active 2005 hurricane season on October 1, 2005, just east of the Yucatan Peninsula in the far western Caribbean. Moving west, Stan quickly made landfall on the Yucatan Peninsula, which it traversed as a weak tropical storm. After re-emerging over warm water in the Bay of Campeche, Stan turned to the southwest and began to intensify. The storm, however, did not have much room to grow over water before encountering the Mexican coastline and so made landfall south of Vera Cruz, Mexico, as a Category 1 hurricane.

The image above shows observations obtained from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) at 10:05 UTC (6:05 am EDT) on October 4. It shows Stan making landfall along the coast of Vera Cruz, Mexico. A band of intense rain (dark red areas) is visible as part of the eastern eyewall, with additional heavy rain associated with an outer rain band located just offshore along the coast. At the time of the image, Stan was a Category 1 storm with maximum sustained winds reported at 120 kilometers per hour (75 miles per hour) by the National Hurricane Center.

The TRMM satellite has been measuring rainfall over the tropics since its launch in 1997. TRMM is a joint mission between NASA and the Japanese space agency JAXA.

For more info: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=15630&oldid=13187

Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest hurricane, as well as one of the five deadliest, in the history of the United States.

Hurricane Paloma was the seventeenth tropical cyclone, sixteenth tropical storm, eighth hurricane and fifth major hurricane of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season.