kevin wrote:jimpsummers wrote:I wonder if Eta and Iota will be retired as storm names, even though they are in the Greek alphabet portion of the storm name list....
At the moment the rule is that a Greek name won't be retired, but that an extraordinary storm with a big impact (like indeed Eta and Iota this year) will be specifically referred to as Eta-2020 or Iota-2020 in the future. However, the discussion regarding this rule has been growing this year for obvious reasons, but there hasn't been any official announcement to date (that I know of) that the Greek naming and/or retirement system will be changed. We will probably hear more about it once the season has officially ended. There are already a few topics in the Talking Tropics section of the website if you want to read what other people on the forum think about the situation:
With What Names Will Eta and Iota Be Replaced? = http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=121604
What if one of the Greek alphabet storms is bad enough to be retired? = http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=121356
Yeah, assume when they came up with the stupid, retire but still use rule back in 2006, they assumed (correctly) that Greek letters were a once in a generation phenomena, and (incorrectly) that being late in the season, you were unlikely to have any Greek storm worth retiring. It was a relatively good bet, there have only been 12 storms that initially formed in October or later than have been retired - so the chances that you would get one of those storms that also coincided with a super active season was relatively low. But of course this year blew that out of the water.