OVER THE EDGE

Forecasters Nearly Out of Tropical Storm Names for Second Year in a Row

Two tropical waves that might become storms in the near future would snag the last two names on the list, forcing officials to turn to a supplementary list.

The Atlantic hurricane name list for 2021 is nearly exhausted. Even as Hurricane Sam remains the sole storm brewing over the ocean, two more tropical depressions show strong possibilities of developing over the next week. If they do, they will be upgraded to tropical storms and named Victor and Wanda. With that, forecasters will have reached the end of the formal list of names pre-approved by the World Meteorological Organization before the hurricane season began on June 1.

Any storms that materialize before the season’s end on Nov. 30 will have to be named from an alternate list, beginning with Adria and Braylen. If this happens, forecasters will have dipped into the supplementaries for the second straight year in a row, and the third time in history. This also marks the seventh straight year in which at least one storm powerful enough to be named has materialized over the Atlantic before the season’s official start date—in 2021, that was Ana, which developed 10 days before June 1.