List of Historic Tropical Cyclone Names - Eastern Pacific

Eastern Pacific

Beginning in 1960 tropical cyclones that were judged by the US Weather Bureau to have intensified into a tropical storm, started to be assigned female names. The original naming lists were designed to be used year after year in sequence, before early in the 1965 season it was decided to rotate the same lists every four years. In 1977, after protests by various women's rights groups, NOAA made the decision to relinquish control over the name selection by allowing a regional committee of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to select new sets of names. The WMO selected six lists of names which contained male names and rotated every six years. They also decided that the new lists of hurricane name would start to be used in 1978 which was a year earlier than the Atlantic. Since 1978 the same lists of names have been used, with names of significant tropical cyclones removed from the lists and replaced with new names. As in the Atlantic basin should the names preselected for the season be exhausted, the contingency plan of using Greek letters for names would be used. However unlike in the Atlantic basin the contingency plan has never had to be used, although in 1985 to avoid using the contingency plan, the letters X, Y, and Z were added to the lists. Since the contingency plan had to be used in the North Atlantic during 2005 there have been a few attempts to get rid of the Greek names as they are seen to be inconsistent with the standard naming convention used for tropical cyclones and are generally unknown and confusing to the public. However none of the attempts have succeeded and thus the Greek letters will be used should the lists be used up.