Sep 06
Who Went Missing?
I just checked out a couple of local weather sites to see what’s new with Hurricane Ike, the current monster of the season. It has weakened from a Category Four and now appears to be headed towards the Gulf. Then I scanned back to the east to look for the third storm, Josephine. She’s gone! Josephine has weakened, apparently, to tropical depression status, effectively losing the storm its name. If she was to re-strengthen to tropical storm status, thereby re-earning a name, would she become Josephine again, or would she undergo a sex-change and take the next name on the list, Kyle? Not that I’m hoping it will pick up steam just to find out, you understand, but I’m just curious.
September 6th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Interesting question. The answer is that the system would get the same name it had before it died out. I only know this because it happened to at least one storm in 2005. Coincidentally, that was the same year we had to use the Greek alphabet because we had something on the order of 600 hurricanes. OK, not really. It was more like 28 or 29, but it felt like 600 to us worriers who sit around biting our nails the second they announce a wave coming off the coast of Africa.