Why Storms Before 1950 Have No Names

The National Hurricane Center's history of storm names describes the earlier habits: for several hundred years many hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the saint's day on which they struck, such as the San Felipe hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico on September 13 in 1876 and 1928. During the Second World War, Army and Navy forecasters plotting storms over the Pacific began to give them women's names on weather maps.

In the United States, a plan to name storms with a phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie) was used for two years and abandoned in 1953, when a new international phonetic alphabet was introduced; from 1953 storms were given female names. Men's names were added to the eastern North Pacific lists in 1978 and to the Atlantic lists in 1979. Names are short and distinctive because, as the Hurricane Center puts it, they are quicker and less subject to error than latitude-longitude identification, especially when two storms are active at once.

In HURDAT2 itself the first named Atlantic storm is from 1950, and the first named Pacific storm in the eastern and central Pacific file is from 1950. The Pacific file begins in 1949, and none of its unnamed storms came within 75 miles of a US city, so every Pacific system on this site has a name.

Before naming, the decade with the most storms near US cities in the record is the 1890s, with 50. The table shows how the record switches from numbers to names in the 1950s, and the unnamed systems that remain in later decades.

67 unnamed storms were major hurricanes (Category 3 or stronger) at their closest pass to some US city. The strongest, the Unnamed 1935 storm (HURDAT2 number AL031935), had 184 mph winds when its centre was 13 miles from Islamorada, FL. Several of these storms are known by popular names taken from places or dates; HURDAT2 does not use them, and neither do the storm pages here.

Positions and winds for nineteenth-century storms are reconstructions from ship logs, newspapers and coastal observations, and the Hurricane Center revises them as reanalysis proceeds; the September 2026 revision of HURDAT2 renumbered the unnamed storms of 1971 to 1975. Within one file revision, a storm's number is what identifies it; across revisions the number can change, which is why the site's corrections log records such changes.