In the past hurricanes have been named in alphabetical order. Unless I blacked-out and missed them, this year they skipped from Ernesto to John. Did I really miss hurricanes F, G, H and I? Did they make landfall? Was there any damage or death? Or are hurricanes just given names in random order now?
A GQ?
Tropical depressions get names, not just hurricanes. Most of them don’t last long, and never make the news. (Or do tropical storms get names - those I think I would have heard of.)
Also, storms anywhere in the Atlantic get names, even ones closer to Africa.
Cafe Society link: you need to watch the Weather Channel more. 
They didn’t skip F,G,H, and I.
Ernesto is an Atlantic storm, the fifth of this season (after Tropical Storms Alberto, Beryl, Chris, and Debby)
John is a Pacific storm, the eleventh of the season, actually, after Tropical Depression Two-E, Tropical Storms Aletta, Emilia, Fabio, and Gilma, and Hurricaines Bud, Carlotta, Daniel, Hector, and Ileana).
Pacific hurricaines don’t usually get much attention in the US media, because they usually don’t affect North America. Hurricaine John, which is tracking further east than most Pacific storms, and therefore affecting the western coast of Mexico, is the exception.
Do typhoons get their own list as well?
Ioke wasn’t on the Hurricane name list for the Pacific.
I wouldn’t want to be on Wake Island right now!
It is on List 3 of the Central North Pacific list.
Yes. Central Pacific hurricanes get their own names, as well. Here’s a list of all the different hurricane names for the different regions of the world:
John’s over in the Pacific. We’ve only gotten up to E on the Atlantic side.
I asked the same dumb question.
Well it may have been a dumb question but I’m smarter for having asked it.
It’s already been answered, but this belongs in GQ, anyway, so off it goes.
Actually, the hurricane season has been so slow, the meteorologists started naming whatever they saw! 
It’s true! The tabloids said so! 
Nope. They are named in alphabetical order, with certain letters skipped. However, two points need to be made: The Weather Bureau names tropical storms, not hurricanes. They number every tropical depression, i.e., every low pressure area that forms within the “cradle of hurricanes” area in the southern North Atlantic, and assign names from the current one of the six rotating lists whenever one of those depressions gets organized enough to have rotating winds of “storm force” – in the high 30s, IIRC 39 MPH. Only when those winds get up to “hurricane force” – around 70 MPH, does it move from “Tropical Storm Bertram” to “Hurricane Bertram” – keeping the same name as it had as a tropical storm. So if F was Francesca this year, there was a T.S. Francesca, but probably never a Hurricane Francesca. And the majority of these storms stay out to sea or at worst hit islands.
Second, there are three lists, for Atlantic, Eastern Pacific, and Western Pacific, in use simultaneously. So you might have Ernesto trucking along off the Georgia coast, while Iole is taking aim at Wake Island, as is the case today – the names coming from separate lists and representing different sequences of storms.
True, that, but, I read a cite and failed to look at the right side of the page., where lo and behold was the list of Pacific names. :smack: