Otto, Paula, Q???

With both Otto and Paula gone we will be monitoring the Caribbean Sea for the next storm. One thing that is for sure is that it will not be named the "Q" storm; there has never been a storm beginning with the letter of Q. The letters Q, U, X, Y, and Z are not included because of the scarcity of names beginning with those letters, and the fact that some of the languages of the Atlantic Basin (French, English, & Spanish) do not include those letters. The next storm will be Richard.

2010 Remaining list of names:
Richard
Shary
Tomas
Virginie
Walter

Since 1953, Atlantic tropical storms have been named from lists originated by the National Hurricane Center. They are now maintained and updated by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization. The original name lists featured only women's names. In 1979, men's names were introduced and they alternate with the women's names. Six lists are used in rotation. Thus, the 2010 list will be used again in 2016. The only time that there is a change in the list is if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity.

In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on. If a storm forms in the off-season, it will take the next name in the list based on the current calendar date. For example, if a tropical cyclone formed on December 28th, it would take the name from the previous season's list of names. If a storm formed in February, it would be named from the subsequent season's list of names.

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