Friday, 3 May 2024

Fiona and Ian Are Retired as Hurricane Names

Fiona and Ian are being retired from the rotating lists of Atlantic tropical cyclone names because of the death and destruction that storms with those names caused last year, the World Meteorological Organization said.

Farrah will replace Fiona on the lists while Idris will replace Ian, the organization said in a statement on Wednesday.

Atlantic hurricanes are named according to six rotating alphabetical lists maintained by the W.M.O.

The names are repeated every six years unless a storm is so deadly and destructive that its name is retired, the organization said. In all, 96 names have been retired from the Atlantic list since 1953, when the current system for naming storms was introduced.

Fiona and Ian both reached Category 4 status, with maximum sustained winds exceeding 130 miles an hour.

Fiona struck the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Turks and Caicos in September 2022 before moving northward over the western Atlantic and hitting Canada.

The storm deluged Puerto Rico and left most of the island without power after it made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane. It caused more than $3 billion in damage as it tore a destructive path across the Caribbean and, later, Canada, where it arrived as a post-tropical cyclone after being downgraded from a Category 3 hurricane. The storm, which the W.M.O. described as the costliest extreme weather event on record in Atlantic Canada, was responsible for 29 deaths, the organization said.

Later in September, Ian struck western Cuba before making landfall in southwestern Florida. The storm, which brought punishing winds, unrelenting rain and devastating flooding, was ultimately blamed for the deaths of 147 people in Florida.

Ian also caused over $112 billion in damage in the United States, “making it the costliest hurricane in Florida’s history and the third costliest in the United States,” the W.M.O. said.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. If all of the storm names are exhausted in a season, a supplemental list is used.

This year, the 21 names are: Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Don, Emily, Franklin, Gert, Harold, Idalia, Jose, Katia, Lee, Margot, Nigel, Ophelia, Philippe, Rina, Sean, Tammy, Vince and Whitney.

Four names from the 2017 list — Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate — do not appear on this year’s list because they have been retired.

In the 2022 hurricane season, there were 14 named storms, eight of which reached hurricane strength.

Hurricanes have become more destructive over time, in no small part because of the influences of a warming planet. Climate change is producing more powerful storms, and they dump more water because of their heavier rainfall and tendency to dawdle and meander; rising seas and slower storms can make for higher and more destructive storm surges. But humans play a part in making storm damage more expensive, as well, by continuing to build in vulnerable coastal areas.

The most powerful hurricanes, at the Category 4 and 5 level, are expected to become more frequent because of climate change, the W.M.O. said.

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