Officially, There’s Now No Chance of Hurricane Sandy Returning

Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A satellite image of Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 28, 2012.

There will never again be a Hurricane Sandy.

The World Meteorological Organization’s hurricane committee, which is responsible for naming tropical cyclones, including hurricanes, announced on Thursday that Sandy was being retired from the official list of storm names.

Sara will take its place.

It is the 77th time the organization has removed a name from the registry of names since 1954 because a storm was deemed “so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for reasons of sensitivity.”

Sandy now joins the likes of Gloria, Hugo and Katrina. The last name retired was Irene in 2011.

Storm names are reused every six years for both the Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific basins, a system that dates back to the 1950s.

For centuries, storms were named arbitrarily.

For example, in the 1840s a powerful storm swept through the Atlantic and ripped the mast off a ship named Antje, and the storm became known as Antje’s Hurricane.

For centuries, powerful storms in the West Indies were named for the saint’s day on which the storm hit.

In 1950, meteorologists devised a system to name storms using the phonetic alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie), but the system was abandoned in 1953 as too confusing.

Instead, they turned to female names in 1954, and in 1979, male names were added to the list. Now, names alternate between male and female.

Finding short, memorable names helps facilitate the passing of information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases and ships at sea, according to the National Hurricane Center.

“The use of easily remembered names greatly reduces confusion when two or more tropical storms occur at the same time,” according to an explanation on the history of hurricane names on the hurricane center’s Web site. “For example, one hurricane can be moving slowly westward in the Gulf of Mexico, while at exactly the same time another hurricane can be moving rapidly northward along the Atlantic coast. In the past, confusion and false rumors have arisen when storm advisories broadcast from radio stations were mistaken for warnings concerning an entirely different storm located hundreds of miles away.”