JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has retired two storm names from the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season and one from the Pacific. Among the names retired include: Erika and Joaquin in the Atlantic and Patricia in the Pacific.
The WMO will replace Erika with Elsa, Joaquin with Julian and Patricia with Pamela when the 2015 list comes up in rotation again in 2021. Of note, Erika is only the second tropical storm, after Allison in 2001, to be retired without ever reaching hurricane status.
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The Weather Channel noted that the Disney theme has once again been enhanced with the addition of Elsa to the list of names along side Ana in the Atlantic and Olaf in the Pacific.
Below is a synopsis of the storms that are among the retired taken directly from NOAA and the National Hurricane Center:
Erika was a tropical storm whose torrential rains inflicted significant casualties and damage on the Caribbean island of Dominica. More than a foot of rain fell there and the storm was directly responsible for 30 deaths. In Haiti, one person died due to a mud slide after Erika had dissipated as a tropical cyclone.
Joaquin was a category 4 hurricane (on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale), whose strong winds and storm surge devastated Crooked Island, Acklins, Long Island, Rum Cay, and San Salvador in the central and southeastern Bahamas in October 2015. Joaquin took the lives of 34 people—all at sea—including the 33 crewmembers of the cargo ship El Faro, which sank during the storm northeast of Crooked Island. Joaquin is the strongest October hurricane known to have affected the Bahamas since 1866.
Patricia was a late-season major hurricane that intensified at a rate rarely observed in a tropical cyclone. It became a category 5 hurricane (on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) over unusually warm waters to the south of Mexico, and is now the strongest hurricane on record in the eastern North Pacific and North Atlantic basins. The hurricane turned north-northeastward and weakened substantially before making landfall in October 2015 along a sparsely populated part of the coast of southwestern Mexico as a category 4 hurricane.
There are six list's of storm names for both the Atlantic and the Pacific and they continue in rotation. A storm is retired when it so deadly and or destructive that it would be deemed insensitive to use it again.
According to the Weather Channel, 80 storms have now been retired with the aforementioned names included. Among the most retired letters, storms that begin with "I" lead the way with 10 retired followed by "C" storms with 9 retired and "F" with 8 storms retired.
Hurricane season begins every year on June 1st.