FOX Weather Meteorologist Kiyana Lewis explains how the World Meteorological Organization manages the names we give to hurricanes and tropical storms.
Choosing a child’s name is one of the most important responsibilities parents face before the birth of their baby. Some families rely on heritage to select a suitable name, while others look to current events and even the weather for inspiration.
BeenVerified, a company specializing in background checks, analyzed naming data from the Social Security Administration and found that features such as the sky, an aurora and even the jet stream play a role in naming trends.
The study revealed that “Sky” is currently the most popular weather-related name, with over 67,000 instances recorded over the last decade.
Approximately 90% of variations of “Sky” are given to females, including names such as “Skylar,” “Skyla” and “Skylah.”
On the opposite end of the spectrum, researchers noted that “Jet” has emerged as the most preferred name for males, with nearly 16,000 occurrences during the same time period.
Baby smiling in shopping cart in grocery store
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Other notable mentions include “Aurora,” with more than 47,000 occurrences; “Hail,” with 38,000 uses; and “Rain,” with just over 8,378 instances, most of which are given to females.
Interestingly, phenomena such as tornadoes, earthquakes, lightning and other disasters do not rank within the federal government’s database of names.
Previous research has shown that parents tend to shy away from naming a baby after a disaster associated with widespread death and destruction.
Historical names such as “Dorian,” “Katrina,” “Sandy,” “Andrew” and “Hugo” have all experienced significant drops in popularity in the years and decades following the landfall of hurricanes with those names.
All of the cyclones reached major hurricane status and caused billions of dollars in damage, prompting the World Meteorological Organization to remove their names from the rotating lists used to identify storm systems.
In the year Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, the name “Katrina” was the 247th most popular name for a baby, but its ranking plummeted to 940 by 2011 and completely fell out of the top 1,000 during the following year.
Similar trends can be observed with other hurricanes, but in the cases of “Dorian,” “Andrew” and “Hugo,” the names have remained in the top 1,000 list but are certainly not as popular as they once were.
“Andrew” was the fifth most popular baby name in 1992 when the Category 5 hurricane slammed South Florida, but according to the latest SSA report, the name has dropped to 65th most popular.
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It remains to be seen whether a name notorious for a disaster will regain its prime status once time has masked some of the wounds associated with the weather event.
The naming of tropical cyclones did not start until 1953, and male names weren’t added to the rotation for the Atlantic basin until 1979.
As of 2023, 96 storm names have been retired from use in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean, including more than a dozen storm names that begin with the letter “I.”
None of the current top ten most popular names for boys and girls are weather-related.
According to the latest available data from the SSA, “Liam” is the number one male name, while “Olivia” is the most popular female name.
Interestingly enough, the name “Liam” is not currently used to identify cyclones in the Atlantic basin, but “Olivia” is on the hurricane naming list for 2024, which will be repeated again in 2030.