Blog: Fiona and Ian retired from Atlantic Basin list by World Meteorological Organization

NEW ORLEANS (WVUE) - The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Hurricane Committee has officially retired Fiona and Ian from the rotating list of Atlantic storm names.

The deadly and destructive nature of the storms in the 2022 Atlantic season prompted the decision. Farrah and Idris will now take their place on the rotating storm name list.

Fiona impacted the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos from September 18th as a hurricane. The storm then moved into the Atlantic and made landfall for a second time on the southeastern coast of Nova Scotia. It left a trail of over 3 billion dollars in destruction, killing 29. Fiona remains the costliest storm in Atlantic Canada and was the deepest cyclone on record by minimum pressure to impact the country.

Ian struck western Cuba as a category 3 hurricane with winds as high as 125 mph. It made a second landfall on southwest Florida as major hurricane killing 150 people and causing 112 billion dollars in damage. Ian is the costliest storm in Florida’s history and the third costliest in the United States history.

The WMO uses names for storms to communicate to the public and alert those who may be in the path of a tropical system. They began naming storms in 1953 after coming to the conclusion that names were easier to remember than numbers and technical terms.

Every year a new list of names is used from a rotation of six lists. When a storm becomes very deadly and destructive, the name is then retired and replaced with a new one starting with the same letter.

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