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- The hurricane name game: Will people take a storm called Flossie seriously?</p>
<p>Doyle Rice and Dinah Voyles Pulver, USA TODAY June 30, 2025 at 12:08 PM</p>
<p>The latest name assigned to a tropical storm – Flossie – in the Eastern Pacific prompted more than a few raised eyebrows and jokes on social media.</p>
<p>Flossie? The name is far more associated with cows in literature and even a long-lived cat in the Guinness Book of World Records than a potentially disastrous storm.</p>
<p>But Flossie may soon be a hurricane and could be headed for the tourist hot spot Cabo San Lucas, at the southern end of Mexico's Baja California peninsula.. Will people take the amiable-sounding storm as seriously as they might another, fiercer named-storm?</p>
<p>There's not been a lot of definitive research to determine whether the name of a storm affects how people prepare or pay attention to storms. One earlier study found that male hurricane names are often taken more seriously than female names, but more than a dozen previous storms have been named Flossie, and at least one of them left its own serious trail of destruction.</p>
<p>Male names taken more seriously?</p>
<p>A 2014 study claimed male hurricane names were taken more seriously than female names:</p>
<p>"In judging the intensity of a storm, people appear to be applying their beliefs about how men and women behave," said Sharon Shavitt, a professor of marketing at Illinois and a co-author of the study, which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. "This makes a female-named hurricane, especially one with a very feminine name such as Belle or Cindy, seem gentler and less violent."</p>
<p>Though that study was mostly debunked, it raised some issues about the naming policy of hurricanes.</p>
<p>Who names hurricanes?</p>
<p>Hurricane names come from long ago and far away: In fact, some of the storm names on the various lists have been around since 1950 (including Flossie!), and they come from the imaginations of the folks at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.</p>
<p>A member of the USA's National Hurricane Center weighs in on the lists, which are chosen long in advance and are on a six-year-rotation. The WMO chooses hurricane names several years in advance, so storms are not named based on their severity at the time.</p>
<p>"It is important to note that tropical cyclones are not named after individuals," the WMO says.</p>
<p>When selecting a new name, the WMO considers certain factors:</p>
<p>∎ Short in character length for ease of use in communication∎ Easy to pronounce∎ Appropriate significance in different languages∎ Uniqueness – same names cannot be used in other regions.</p>
<p>From the early 1950s until the late 1970s, hurricanes received only female names. The alternating male-female naming system was adopted in the late 1970s because of society's increased awareness of sexism, the authors in the 2014 study said.</p>
<p>The first male storm was Hurricane Bob in 1979.</p>
<p>Tropical Storm Flossie spins near Mexico in this satellite image from June 30, 2025.Time for an upgrade?</p>
<p>So is it time to modernize the list, which contains some rather old-fashioned names to American ears, such as Flossie, which has been used in one form or another for 19 tropical cyclones worldwide since 1950?</p>
<p>"Some of the hurricane names which have been in use for many years may now seem a bit dated," admitted WMO spokesperson Claire Nullis in an e-mail to USA TODAY June 30. "The (WMO) hurricane committee is concerned with the retirement of names of hurricanes which were particularly damaging or deadly – and they tend to be later in the season (so later in the alphabet) than early season ones.</p>
<p>"I'm not aware that the hurricane committee has ever discussed withdrawing names which don't sound threatening," she told USA TODAY.</p>
<p>And as a popular baby name in the U.S., the Bump said, the name Flossy peaked in 1908 before bottoming out in 1927.</p>
<p>Flossie's been around</p>
<p>It turns out Flossie, or Flossy, has been in the hurricane vernacular for a very long time – dating all the way back to 1950 in the Western Pacific and 1956 in the Atlantic.</p>
<p>It's been used for 19 tropical cyclones worldwide: two the Atlantic Ocean, eight in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and nine in the western Pacific Ocean.</p>
<p>One of the more notable Flossies occurred in 2001, when remnant moisture from the eastern Pacific's Hurricane Flossie helped bring strong thunderstorms, lightning and flash floods across portions of Southern California in early September 2001, according to a National Hurricane Center report. "There were no direct deaths or damage from Flossie while it was a tropical cyclone, but two people died from lightning strikes when the remnants arrived in Southwestern California."</p>
<p>Four people were struck by lightning in the San Diego and San Bernardino Mountains and two of them died, one a 53-year old man struck while hiking and a 13-year-old boy was killed while standing in an open field. One storm brought 2 inches of rain in an hour and caused flooding in San Diego and Riverside counties, the hurricane center said.</p>
<p>In 2013, Tropical Storm Flossie almost made landfall in Hawaii but moved to the north. Two hurricanes named Flossie neared Hawaii, a category 4 in 2007 and a category 1 in 2019.</p>
<p>This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How Flossie became a name for a potentially serious hurricane</p>
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