Should This 2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season Name Have Already Been Retired?

21 Hurricane Names, One Newcomer This Season

One of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season names could have been retired after the last time it was used six years ago, based on the impacts of severe rainfall flooding along parts of the Gulf Coast in 2019.

This Year's List

Since 1979, the list of names used for hurricanes and storms in the Atlantic Basin has been repeated every six years. The list for 2025 is below, starting with Andrea.

These rotating lists of names are maintained by the World Meteorological Organization's hurricane committee, not the U.S. National Hurricane Center.

(MORE: Other Notables About 2025's Names)

Some Were Retired

There's an exception to this six-year repeating rule.

If a storm is so deadly or destructive, the WMO hurricane committee can vote to retire the name from use on a future storm. This avoids any confusion or insensitivity over the use of particularly infamous storms like Harvey, Ian, Katrina, Maria or Sandy to describe a future storm.

Since the naming of Atlantic tropical cyclones ditched the phonetic alphabet in 1953, 99 Atlantic tropical cyclone names have been retired. Three Atlantic names from the 2024 hurricane season - Beryl, Helene and Milton - were retired this past spring. Brianna, Holly and Miguel will replace those retired names in the 2030 hurricane season.

The Case For Retiring Imelda

The ninth name in this year's list is Imelda. That name may sound familiar if you live in Texas or Louisiana.

In mid-September 2019, Tropical Storm Imelda quickly formed off the upper Texas coast, then moved inland and slowed to a crawl.

Over 30 inches of rain fell from the northern suburbs of Houston eastward into Liberty, Chambers, Jefferson and Orange Counties, Texas. The peak total of 44.29 inches near the town of Fannett made Imelda the fifth wettest tropical cyclone by peak rainfall to strike the continental U.S., according to the National Hurricane Center.

An estimated 8,200 homes were flooded in Harris, Liberty, Montgomery and Jefferson Counties, according to the National Hurricane Center's final report. Hundreds of high-water rescues were performed, and well over 1,000 vehicles were flooded.

But It Wasn't Retired

Despite all that, several reasons may have kept Imelda from being retired:

- Low death toll: Only five deaths were directly attributed to Imelda, according to the NHC report, despite the recent trend of U.S. tropical cyclone deaths from rainfall flooding.

- Poor pandemic timing: The in-person WMO committee meeting in spring 2020 was canceled due to the emerging COVID pandemic. Instead, the committee tabled any consideration of name retirements from the 2019 hurricane season until an online meeting in spring 2021. Given that the online meeting happened after the frenetic 2020 season, from which three storm names were retired and a rollout of a new supplemental names list in place of the Greek alphabet, perhaps Imelda was buried under all that in 2021.

- Overshadowed weeks earlier: The one storm from 2019 retired during that 2021 WMO committee meeting was Hurricane Dorian, a Category 5 beast that stalled and lashed the northwest Bahamas for 51 straight hours. That happened less than three weeks before Imelda.

- Overshadowed by Harvey: Two years before Imelda, Harvey lingered much longer and, therefore, its rainfall footprint was about 13 times larger than that of Imelda. Harvey's peak rainfall was just over 60 inches, "the most significant tropical cyclone event in U.S. history," according to the NHC. Harvey's damage toll ($161.3 billion) was the nation's second costliest hurricane, 26 times that of Imelda. Harvey also claimed 68 lives in Texas during the storm, the most of any Texas tropical cyclone since 1919.

- Few tropical storms retired: Only 2 names have been retired from tropical storms that never became hurricanes. June 2001's Allison nailed the entire Houston metro with massive flooding, the city's costliest natural disaster at the time. And 2015's Erika-triggered epic flooding may have set the Caribbean island of Dominica's progress back 20 years. So it appears the bar is even higher to retire a name from a tropical storm.

"I" Storms Lead Retirees

Names beginning with the letter “I” have been retired 13 times, the most of any letter.

This is because these ninth named storms of a season tend to form in the most active months when conditions are most favorable for stronger hurricanes that could have a significant impact. (Note: "Iota" in the 2020 hurricane season was also retired, but was from the supplemental Greek letter name list after all names were used up.)

While Imelda wasn't retired, Ida, and then Ian were retired after the 2021 and 2022 hurricane seasons, respectively.

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.