Why exactly did the use of Greek letters as names for Hurricanes happen the first place, despite the fairly obvious and predictable impracticalities?

Question

The Washington Post article Hurricanes Eta and Iota brought disaster to Central America. Officials can’t retire their names. describes a complicated situation, aspects of which are:

Eta roared ashore in northern Nicaragua on Nov. 3, followed by Iota exactly 13 days later and just 15 miles to the south. Both were Category 4 hurricanes at landfall, though Iota had attained Category 5 status offshore. The pair brought flood disasters across Central America, in addition to extreme wind and storm surge near the coast.

They’re the textbook candidates for having their names axed from the Hurricane Center’s six-year rotating name list. Just as Katrina was replaced by Katia, Michael with Milton, and Sandy with Sara, there would ordinarily be little question that the name of a deadly and destructive Category 4 hurricane would be retired. But in the case of the Greek alphabet, there’s no easy replacement.

“The Committee … agreed that it was not practical to ‘retire into hurricane history’ a letter in the Greek Alphabet,” read a news release from the World Meteorological Organization, which oversees hurricane naming across the world’s oceans.

Instead of removing a letter from the list, Greek letters can only be symbolically retired. Under the current policy, “Eta 2020” and “Iota 2020” would be listed as retired storms if the WMO voted accordingly, but the names Eta and Iota would remain in circulation for future storms. Some meteorologists fear this defeats the purpose of retiring names, while others find that assigning Greek letters to storms is impractical to begin with.

Question: Why exactly were Greek letters used as names for Hurricanes in the first place, despite the fairly obvious and predictable impracticalities? Certainly this exact problem was brought up, how was it dismissed?

Related but different (because the current question is backward-looking), and also in need of answers:

• In the future, is the World Meteorological Organization going to allow Hurricanes Zeta, Eta, and Theta to exist simultaneously?
• What will happen if the Greek letter names were exhausted for naming tropical storms?

Answer 1

Well for one major reason, the assumption was that seasons with so numerous hurricanes were rare. Canonically, tropical cyclones typically follow a Poisson Distribution. If you consider that, of the English alphabet, only 21 of 26 letters are used for names, and if you assume that the average number of hurricanes from the past decade were to stay unchanged compared to this decade (155 tropical storms/10 years= 15.5 tropical storms per year), then the probability of going over 21 tropical cyclones is about 6.96%. Such a view is backed up by the World Meteorological Organization.

But if you say, "aren't the number of tropical cyclones supposed to increase under climate change?" to challenge my assumption of constant tropical cyclones per decade, I will argue that canonically, the frequency that tropical cyclones form should decrease, but the intensity should increase. So the assumption doesn't actually hold, but should actually overestimate the probability of more hurricanes in the long term.

So why use Greek letters? Well, to be consistent, something has to be used to draw attention to the storm. Cycling back to the A's sends the wrong message. And the Greek alphabet was used previously, without major consequence.

Arguably, it may be easier to only name storms that make hurricane strength. However, that would be inconsistent, and may miss strong, rain-heavy storms. For example, Tropical Storm Allison was retired without making the hurricane wind requirement.