Tropical Storm Vicky formed Monday leaving only one name left on 2020 storm name list, so now what?

Published 9:23 pm Monday, September 14, 2020

With the formation of Tropical Storm Vicky on Monday, list of 21 available storm names set aside for this year has dwindled down to just one – Wilfred.

With more than two and a half months left in the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, the National Hurricane Center says it will go to plan B for only the second time since they started naming tropical storms and hurricanes in 1953.

So what’s plan B? Use the Greek alphabet.

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In case you’ve missed it, we’ve already gone through the following:

Arthur
Bertha
Cristobal
Dolly
Edouard
Fay
Gonzalo
Hanna
Isaias
Josephine
Kyle
Laura
Marco
Nana
Omar
Paulette
Rene
Sally
Teddy
Vicky

And Wilfred remains the last name option before we go Greek. Note, the National Hurricane Center doesn’ use Q, U, X, Y, and Z, because it’s difficult to come up with a number of names that start with those letters.

Here’s the list of Greek letters (in case you’ve forgotten what they are):

Alpha
Beta
Gamma
Delta
Epsilon
Zeta
Eta
Theta
Iota
Kappa
Lambda
Mu
Nu
Xi
Omicron
Pi
Rho
Sigma
Tau
Upsilon
Phi
Chi
Psi
Omega

In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina famously roared ashore a myriad of other storms followed and the National Hurrican Center had to use six Greek letters to name storms.