Title says it all, really. Why do we name them?
Well, the NOAA says:
I would also assume it is easier to reconcile insurance claims with a named storm vs. a geographic storm. That and easier to retire storms for historical info.
Not that I want to make insurance companies lives easier blasted homeowners insurance hikes
Systems that produce hurricanes are relatively long-lived and stable, meteorologically. Remember that names are assigned when the system reaches the status of “tropical depression,” and since these systems remain relatively cohesive as they travel and evolve, giving them a name is easier than using other characteristics to identify the storm. This is especially true when the same system can affect multiple countries and states.
Tornadoes, floods, blizzards, and even earthquakes, are relatively short-lived, and while they can cause an enormous amount of damage, the damage is generally limited to a very specific area, over a relatively short period of time. I supposed we could name each front as it passes over the US (or any other continent), but most fronts produce very little significant damage anywhere they pass, so there isn’t much reason to refer to them after they have passed.
Giving each system a name also makes it easier to identify individual systems that exist at the same time. (See FEMA For Kids: Hurricane Names. Fronts that produce tornadoes and blizzards move in a relatively predictable west-east pattern. The exact path of a Hurricane/Tropical Depression system is not nearly as predictable, so you could actually have several different systems in the same area at the same time, but moving in different directions.
Maybe, though, your question is meant to be “Why do we use people’s names to identify hurricanes?” The answer to that is “tradition,” as explained in the link above and here. There’s really no other reason to use people’s names instead of codes (like 20060914 as the date of origin for a storm that originates on September 14, 2006). But that would start sounding too much like Star Trek or something…
There’s no hurricane “Bryan” in the list. I’m disappointed somehow.
Like this trio of storms currently off the coast of China; (from OSEI Image of the day ).
the tradition of naming hurricanes is older than one would think.
after spain started establishing foot-holds on this side of the world, bad hurricanes that would do a large amount of damage would be named after the saint of the day it hit. that way you could easily reference a part. bad storm when telling others about it. they would also know which day it hit by the name.
some of the islands kept up the saint custom. in the u.s., we would go with the year (the 1926 storm) or weekend (the labour day storm) or place (the galveston storm). then girl names were decided on, and finally in the interest of fairness and equality, both girl and boy names.