The World Meteorological Organization said Monday that Elsa and Julian will be used for future storms in the Atlantic, while Pamela will be used in the eastern North Pacific.
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The organization retires the names of storms that were deemed to be destructive.
Goodbye and good riddance to Joaquin, Erika, and Patricia.
Though not the deadliest hurricane season by any measure, 2015 still saw the deaths of dozens of people.
This NOAA satellite image taken Sunday, Oct. 4, 2015.at 9:45 AM EDT shows slowly weakening Hurricane Joaquin southwest of Bermuda, moving in a north-northeast direction. However, if a particular storm brings significant amounts of death and/or destruction, the organization removes that name for future use. El Faro sunk in 2015’s Hurricane Joaquin.
Joaquin caused tremendous damage to the Bahamian islands of San Salvador, Crooked Island, Acklins, Long Island and Rum Cay. In Haiti, a mudslide that occurred after Erika disappeared as a tropical cyclone left one person dead in its wake.
Finally, Hurricane Patricia, a late October storm, became a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale just a day after it had been a Category 1 storm.
Joaquin was more typical in that it did reach Category 4 status and devastated a number of islands in the central and southeastern Bahamas.
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Hurricane Patricia was a category 5 storm off the west coast of Mexico in October of 2015, and is now the record-strongest observed hurricane in either the eastern Pacific or in the Atlantic Ocean basins. NOAA says some 10,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by the storm, and 100,000 acres of farmland were inundated.
