Let it blow? Hurricane naming weirdness has tropics reading like the cast of Disney’s “Frozen”

MIAMI – Elsa, Anna and Olaf. Read these names to any child or parent and they’ll instantly tell you that this is the cast of Frozen at the Disney box office.

Ask a meteorologist and you might get a different answer.

As it turns out, when the hurricane name list came out for 2021, it coincidentally contained many of the same names as the characters in the hit movie.

Tropical storm Ana, like its namesake in the movie, didn’t have a lot of powers. Ana kicked off the Atlantic hurricane season on May 22 in the middle of the ocean. It only lasted two days and handled sustained winds of 40 knots before losing its tropical characteristics.

Hurricane Elsa had a bit more power when it formed in early July and briefly achieved Category 1 hurricane status, causing damage to Barbados. Elsa regained the force of the hurricane as it approached the northwest coast of Florida, but weakened to a tropical storm before making landfall in eastern Florida on July 7. It set a record for the first tropical storm of the season.

And now, currently, Hurricane Olaf, which finally got to spend some time in the summer, was in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of Baja California.

Olaf what set to brush by southern Baja California Sur Friday as a Category 1 storm. Its heavy rains could cause flash floods and significant landslides in this region.

Coincidence? Or…?

The names of hurricanes are defined by the World Meteorological Organization.

There are six different name lists that rotate every year and repeat after six years, so this year’s list is the same as in 2015 and 2009, etc. Ana and Olaf were also on their respective rosters at the time, so they predate the film.

List of names of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. (Courtesy: World Meteorological Organization)

But Elsa is a newcomer to the list. Storm “E” on this particular list was “Erika” until he was retired after the 2015 season when that caused significant damage and flood victims on the island of Dominica. Frozen was released in 2013 and “Elsa” was added to the 2021 roster in 2016.

WMO does not publish exactly how specific names are chosen, only that they should be easy to understand and in the case of the Atlantic Basin, come from English, Spanish or French names to reflect the geographic coverage of the Atlantic and Caribbean countries.

So it’s probably a coincidence that Elsa appeared on the list this year, although there was probably a 7 in 10 chance. “Let it go“was playing somewhere in the background when the time came to pick the” E “replacement.

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