Systems with more than one name

[He Yuan]

Hello, 

For tropical cyclones that have more than one name, separated by a colon, is there a column that indicates the reason for this? I assume for most, it is because the system moved through AORs and was renamed by another meteorological centre.

However, for some: i.e.,

• 1962261N15121 CARLA:CLARA
• 2004081S12103 ITSANG:ITSENG:OSCAR
• 2019264N19071 HIKAA:HIKKA
• ...

Are these spelling corrections? 

Many thanks for your help and advice. 

Best,

Yvonne

[Jennifer Gahtan - NOAA Federal]

Hi Yvonne,

Multiple names may occur in IBTrACS for multiple reasons. 

As you note, this is sometimes due to a change in the basin or area of responsibility, though not all changes in areas of responsibility lead to name changes. Historical name changes may also happen when a TC crossed between different regions near Australia due to agency policies during the earlier period.

Other times, multiple names occur when names given by our source agencies do not match; these may be completely different names or just different spellings of the same name. Some of these result from a lack of coordination or disagreement whereas others may be misspellings or errors. These discrepancies mainly happen in the historical record prior to the formalization of names through the WMO.

The IBTrACS team corrects some names if there is a clear error, but not everything has been caught or has a clear resolution.

For the specific storms you mentioned:

• 1962261N15121: Asian agencies had CARLA, historical USA source TD9635 had CLARA
• 2004081S12103: Oscar (BOM) was renamed ITSENG (Reunion) when it crossed from Australia’s area of responsibility to the Indian Ocean. However, reanalyzed source Neumann has OSCAR/ITSANG, leading to multiple spellings. We should probably correct the ITSANG spelling to ITSENG.
• 2019264N19071: JTWC spelling was HIKAA and New Delhi HIKKA. It looks like Hikaa is correct (source Maldives) and Hikka is a misspelling, so this is another correction we should make.

Hope this helps and feel free to bring other discrepancies to our attention.

Jennifer

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Jennifer Gahtan, Ph.D.

Physical Scientist
CSSD
NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)
151 Patton Ave. Asheville, NC 28801