When it comes to tropical storms and hurricanes, the question I get most often is "How and why are they named?" As for the "Why?" naming storms simply makes referencing them easier, and especially helps when several are going at once - for example, here's a satellite image from around this time in late September of 1998 when there were four hurricanes, the most ever at the same time in that ocean.

As for the "how" of naming, the use of women's names originated in World War Two, when meteorologists in the Pacific gave women's names to storms for ease of reference. And U.S. pilots often named their airplanes after their wives or girlfriends. The military connection continued after the war, though women's names weren't used right away - from 1950 to 1952, hurricanes in the Atlantic were named using the phonetic alphabet - for example, Able, Baker and Charlie. There was even a Hurricane Easy in 1950 and a Hurricane Fox in 1951.

But in 1953, the U.S. Weather Bureau switched to lists of women's names. Then, in 1979, men's names were alternated. Since then, six lists of names have been used on a rotating basis, agreed upon by a committee of the World Meteorological Organization.