2025 Named Storms

The National Hurricane Center will release its official outlook on the upcoming season in May.

Colorado State University will released its first season outlook and are predicting that up to 17 storms are expected with nine of them becoming hurricanes https://tropical.colostate.edu/forecasting.html.

The 2024 season saw an above-average 18 named storms with 11 intensifying into hurricanes. Five of those were major hurricanes intensifying into Category 3 or higher.

Here is the list of 21 names for the 2025 season https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/aboutnames.shtml:

Andrea
Barry
Chantal
Dexter
Erin
Fernand
Gabrielle
Humberto
Imelda
Jerry
Karen
Lorenzo
Melissa
Nestor
Olga
Pablo
Rebekah
Sebastien
Tanya
Van
Wendy

The list of hurricane names is determined by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization. The National Hurricane Center uses six lists in rotation and they are recycled every six years, so 2025’s list should show up again in 2031, unless that formula is deviated from, for any reason.

A long time ago, hurricanes were named randomly. The military, for example, started naming storms after their girlfriends and wives, but none of these choices were made public. Then, the National Weather Service decided to give human names to hurricanes to quickly identify storms and make it easier for citizens and media to process warning messages. They used the World War II Alphabet – Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy – but this created confusion because every year the storm names were the same.

A few years later, in 1953, US weather professionals started using female names, sorted alphabetically. In 1979, they began alternating the feminine designations with male names, recycling the list every six years.

Names of especially destructive hurricanes are usually retired with the offending name replaced by another name. Recently, the names Otto and Matthew were retired after causing extensive damage back in 2016.