You know you're in the middle of an extraordinarily active Atlantic hurricane season when one day you turn on the Weather Channel and, just past the peak time of mid-September they've already gone through "V" with only "W" left to name a storm before going into the Greek alphabet...and naturally there's another developing tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico about to become "Wilfred". But you know it's much worse than that when the following day you discover that this now-tropical storm didn't get the name Wilfred...or even Alpha, the first letter in the Greek alphabet: no, there's so much activity right now in Atlantic that those two names quickly went to other storms. We're now at the Beta stage in tropical storm names, already the most ever since 2005 when we went through Zeta, the sixth Greek letter. To contrast 2005 with 2020, by this date fifteen years ago we were only at the "R" point in names, with Rita in the process of developing into a powerful hurricane that would devastate the eastern Texas coast. Since there is still so much time left in 2020, I'm wondering whether, if an upcoming "Greek" hurricane causes so much damage or loss of life that its name would normally be retired, what would they replace it with...a comparable letter from another language's alphabet, or maybe just skip over that letter the next time it comes up?
I don't think that Tropical Storm Beta will develop into a strong hurricane due to wind shear on its northwest side, but it's forecast to slow down, stop, and just sit along the Texas coast and inflict its winds, rain, and storm surge on the area for a couple of days before moving eastward along the coastline. That's the problem with Gulf storms: they're bound to hit somewhere...
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