MOBILE, Ala. — As Hurricane Isaias pushes wind and rain across the Alabama Gulf Coast and inland this weekend, many residents riding out the storm have wondered about the Hurricane Isaias name: Where did it come from, and why is it back? The answer runs through a retired Texas hurricane, a quiet season that never reached the letter I, a destructive East Coast storm in 2020 and an international system of rotating name lists that dates back decades.
Isaias is the Spanish form of the biblical name Isaiah. It joined the list of Atlantic hurricane names after Hurricane Ike was removed from the rotation following the 2008 season, and it is now being used for the second time in the Atlantic. The National Hurricane Center’s pronunciation guide renders it “ees-ah-EE-ahs.”
How the Isaias name replaced Ike
According to the National Hurricane Center, Ike was retired after the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season because of the extensive damage and destruction it caused, particularly along the Texas coast.
Ike was a long-lived storm that formed from a tropical wave off the coast of Africa in early September 2008 and reached Category 4 strength over the open Atlantic. It struck the Turks and Caicos Islands, the southeastern Bahamas and much of Cuba before entering the Gulf. According to the hurricane center’s official report on the storm, Ike’s center came ashore on the north end of Galveston Island, Texas, early on Sept. 13, 2008, at the upper end of Category 2 strength, with maximum sustained winds near 110 mph.
What made Ike so destructive was its sheer size and the storm surge it pushed ashore. Water levels began rising along the upper Texas and Louisiana coasts roughly a day before landfall, and the hurricane center documented inundation of at least 10 feet in parts of Galveston Island and the surrounding mainland. The center estimated total U.S. damage at about $29.5 billion, which at the time ranked Ike as the second costliest hurricane to affect the United States, behind only Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
With that record of destruction, the World Meteorological Organization’s hurricane committee struck Ike from the list. The name Isaias was chosen as its replacement on the list that was next used in 2014.
Why storm names are retired
According to NOAA, a name can be removed when a storm is so deadly or costly that using it again would be inappropriate or insensitive. The decision is intended to avoid confusion and to preserve the historical significance of particularly destructive hurricanes.
The National Hurricane Center does not control the process. Retirement decisions are made at an annual meeting of an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization, which strikes the name from the list and selects another to take its place. Sometimes the replacement keeps the same first letter and has a similar cultural background, as Isaias did when it stepped in for Ike.
The Gulf Coast is well represented on the retired list. Among the retired Atlantic names are Katrina, which devastated portions of the Gulf Coast in 2005; Ivan, which struck the Alabama Gulf Coast in 2004; and Michael, which caused catastrophic damage in the Florida Panhandle in 2018. The list maintained by the hurricane center also includes several other names familiar to Mobile and Baldwin county residents, among them Camille (1969), Frederic (1979), Elena (1985), Opal (1995), Georges (1998) and Dennis (2005).
About 100 Atlantic names have been retired since 1954. Laura, one of the storms from the 2020 season that used the same list as this year, was retired and replaced by Leah, which appears on the 2026 list.
Six lists, rotating every six years
The World Meteorological Organization uses six lists of Atlantic storm names that rotate every six years. That means the names used in 2026 are the same ones used in 2020, 2014 and 2008, except for storms whose names have been retired. The 2026 list will come up again in 2032.
Each Atlantic list has 21 names, running alphabetically and skipping the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z, which have too few usable names. This year’s list begins Arthur, Bertha, Cristobal, Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gonzalo and Hanna before reaching Isaias, the ninth name. It continues with Josephine, Kyle, Leah, Marco, Nana, Omar, Paulette, Rene, Sally, Teddy, Vicky and Wilfred.
Atlantic hurricane lists include English, Spanish and French names to reflect the languages spoken throughout North America, Central America and the Caribbean, and they alternate between traditionally male and female names. According to the World Meteorological Organization, names come from predetermined lists developed by regional meteorological officials rather than being chosen individually as storms form, and they are selected to be familiar to people across the regions affected by tropical storms.
If a season produces more than 21 named storms, the hurricane center now turns to a supplemental list approved by the World Meteorological Organization. That list replaced the Greek alphabet, which forecasters used during the record-breaking 2005 and 2020 seasons before the committee decided to stop using it.
A name that waited six years for its first storm
Having a name on the list does not guarantee that a storm will receive it. Names are assigned in order as storms reach tropical storm strength, so a quiet season may never get far down the alphabet.
That is exactly what happened in 2014. The Atlantic season produced only eight named storms that year, ending with Hanna, so the list never reached Isaias.
The name was used for the first time in 2020, during one of the busiest Atlantic seasons on record. According to the National Hurricane Center’s report on that storm, Isaias became a tropical storm on July 30, 2020, south of Puerto Rico. It crossed the eastern Dominican Republic, strengthened into a hurricane near the northern coast of Hispaniola and moved through the Bahamas before paralleling Florida’s east coast offshore.
Isaias made its final landfall near Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina, late on Aug. 3, 2020, as a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of about 90 mph. It then raced north-northeast through the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, keeping much of its strength over land. The hurricane center counted 12 direct deaths, including 10 in the continental United States, along with 39 tornadoes. At one point nearly 3 million customers were without power along its path, and U.S. damage was estimated at about $4.8 billion.
Despite that toll, the 2020 Isaias was not retired, which is why the name returned on the 2026 list.
A late start to the 2026 season
This year’s storm has taken the name in very different circumstances. The 2026 Atlantic season had been unusually quiet, and Isaias became its first hurricane in early October, one day short of tying a 121-year-old record for the latest-forming first hurricane of an Atlantic season. That record dates to 1905, when the season’s first hurricane formed on Oct. 8.
Isaias strengthened into a Category 2 hurricane on Thursday, Oct. 8, and into a Category 3, or major, hurricane on Friday morning, Oct. 9, with maximum sustained winds near 120 mph. According to the National Hurricane Center, it had weakened slightly by the time it came ashore near Destin, Florida, at about 8:30 p.m. Friday as a Category 2 hurricane with 105 mph winds, bringing damaging wind, storm surge and heavy rain to the coast and knocking out power to more than 200,000 Alabama customers by late Friday as it spread north across the state.
Whether the name Isaias stays on the list will depend on how severe the storm’s final toll proves to be. The World Meteorological Organization’s hurricane committee typically considers retirement requests from affected countries at its annual meeting in the spring after a season ends.
Why hurricanes have names at all
Naming tropical storms is meant to make warnings easier to understand, remember and communicate. The National Hurricane Center notes that short, distinctive names are quicker and less prone to error than the older latitude-and-longitude identifications, especially when forecasters, emergency managers, coastal stations and ships at sea are exchanging detailed information.
Names also reduce confusion when more than one storm is active at the same time. That has been the case this week: while Isaias moved toward the northern Gulf Coast, Hurricane Simon was strengthening in the eastern Pacific off Mexico, and Tropical Storm Rachel was expected to reach Baja California and Southern California. Eastern Pacific storms are named from a separate set of six rotating lists.
The practice has a long history. For centuries, many hurricanes in the West Indies were named for the saint’s day on which they struck. During World War II, Army and Navy meteorologists commonly used women’s names for storms on weather maps. According to the hurricane center, the United States began using female names for Atlantic storms in 1953 after abandoning a short-lived plan to name them using a phonetic alphabet. Men’s names were added to the Atlantic lists in 1979, the same year Hurricane Frederic struck Mobile and Baldwin counties, and the first permanent six-year rotation began that year.
What matters more than the name
Whatever its name, emergency managers stress that the threats from Isaias are what count. Residents in Mobile, Baldwin and other affected counties should continue to follow updates from the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service in Mobile and their county emergency management agencies, and keep these precautions in mind as the storm moves out:
- Stay off the roads until officials say it is safe, and never drive or walk through flooded streets.
- Treat every downed power line as live and report it to your utility.
- Run generators only outdoors, well away from windows, doors and vents, to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning.
- Photograph any damage before making repairs, and contact your insurance company as soon as possible.
- Check on elderly neighbors and relatives, especially those without power.