Good morning everyone. Sorry that I’ve been away for the past couple of days, but I’ve been working hard with the new training at my job, and I’ve not really been in the mood to put something up on any of my sites. Anyway, I did catch a news article via the Miami Herald on the internet that made a mention of some things concerning the 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season. On Tuesday, May 13th, the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization, based in Geneva Switzerland came to Orlando for its annual meeting, and at that meeting, it was announced that three storms from the 2007 season had their names retired.

The three storms: Dean, Felix, and Noel, perhaps the most devastating and newsworthy systems of the 2007 Atlantic Hurricane Season, were retired from the cyclical list of names that are used by the National Hurricane Center each year for a six year period. Both Hurricane Dean and Hurricane Felix were Category Five Hurricanes on the Saffir-Simpson Scale, and were the only major hurricanes from what was a below average season in terms of that particular category of storm. However, both systems, particularly Dean, were among the most powerful storms on record at the time of landfall. While both Dean and Felix struck during the very heart of the active period of the Atlantic season, Noel was a late season storm that formed during the final days of October, and lingered into the first few days of November.

Many people might not know this, but Noel was a storm that caused a lot of headaches for the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. More importantly though, Noel was a killer storm in the Caribbean. Both Dean and Noel killed almost 200 people in the Caribbean and the Bahamas while Felix left 130 people dead in the Central American countries of Nicaragua and Honduras. The next season, these storm names are to be used, 2013, they will be replaced with those of Dorian, Ferdinand, and Nestor.