- The next tropical storm in the Atlantic will be called Helene.
- This name has been used in the Atlantic Basin since 1958.
- The 1958 Helene hit North Carolina with an intensity of 4.
- Other notoriously destructive “H” storms have been decommissioned, including Harvey and Hugo.
The next tropical storm in the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season will be Helene, a name whose history stretches back to the early years of tropical cyclone naming.
Where it is in the list: Helene is the eighth storm name on the list for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.
On average, the eighth storm of the season typically arrives by September 9, according to the National Hurricane Center’s (NHC) 30-year climatology from 1991 to 2020.
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The newest Helene: Six years ago, Helene 2018 became a tropical storm just 12 hours after leaving West Africa on September 8. According to the NHC report, this development was rare so close to Africa. Only 10 other tropical cyclones formed further east than Helene in 2018.
It later developed into a Category 2 hurricane west of the Cape Verde Islands before making a sharp turn north into the eastern Atlantic Ocean.
Other Atlantic Helenes: Including 2018, there have been six Helene storms in the Atlantic basin over the past 65 years, all shown in the map below.
Two of them hit the US mainland. Tropical Storm Helene reached the coast of the Florida Panhandle on September 21, 2000, and swept through the Carolinas and Virginia Tidewater two days later.
In late September 1958, the eye of Category 4 Hurricane Helene came within 10 miles of the coast of Cape Fear, North Carolina. Although it never made landfall, the intense eyewall grazed the North Carolina coast. A gust of 135 mph was the highest ever recorded at the Weather Bureau’s office in Wilmington, North Carolina. Helene’s winds, storm surge, and deluge of rain caused an estimated $11.2 million (1958 dollars) in damage in the Carolinas.
According to the weather bureau’s final report, “the Carolina coast narrowly escaped a potential major disaster.”
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Helene was almost retired: The Atlantic basin tropical storm and hurricane name lists are updated every six years unless a storm is so destructive and/or deadly that a World Meteorological Organization committee decides to remove that name from future lists. This avoids, for example, using Katrina, Sandy or Maria to describe a future weak tropical storm in the open ocean.
If the path of Hurricane Helene in 1958 had been 10 to 20 miles further north and west, the storm surge and wind damage might have been worse than that of Hurricane Hazel in 1954.
And that would have meant that 1958 would have been the only Helene event in the Atlantic.
If Helene is not too destructive and deadly in 2024, this name will be used again in the 2030 Atlantic hurricane season.
Other “H” storms have been eliminated: From 1954 to 2023, 96 names were removed from future use.
Six of them were “H” storms, most notably Harvey (2017) and Hugo (1989). The others were Hattie (1961), the aforementioned Hazel (1954), Hilda (1964) and Hortense (1996).
Helene fell out of use six years after the 1958 hurricane. Instead, Hilda was given to the 1964 hurricane that wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast and led to the name’s retirement.
This is because the six-year reuse process for name lists began in 1979.
Number of storm names retired from service from 1954 to 2023 by initial letter. Six storm names beginning with “H” were retired, less than half of the storm names beginning with “I”.
(Data: NOAA/NHC; Graphics: Infogram)
So, to summarize, Hurricane Helene was nearly destructive enough to be decommissioned in 1958. Helene could have been decommissioned six years later in 1964, but Hilda was assigned to be the H-storm of that year instead.
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Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. His lifelong love of meteorology began with an encounter with a tornado as a child in Wisconsin. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite subjects. Contact him at X (formerly Twitter), Topics, on facebook. And Blue sky.
