If you wanted your name added to the list of hurricane names, could you get it there?
The National Hurricane Center gets so many requests for certain names to be used, they put it right up at the top of their hurricane name history page!
Here's the answer, the NHC doesn't control the naming of storms. Names are picked by the United Nations World Meteorological Organization.
According to the NHC it all started in the 1800's. Storms in the West Indies were named after the particular saint's day on which the hurricane occurred.
The novel "Storm" published in 1941 used a woman's name for a storm and it became common practice by WWII as Army and Navy meteorologists tracked storms.
For a short time in the 50's, the US came up with a phonetic alphabet to name storms like Able, Baker, Charlie. But by 1953 the US settled on just female names. That practice ended in 1979 when male and female names were included in lists for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.