Lala, the name for the hurricane spinning toward the Big Island of Hawaii on Saturday morning, was not chosen on a whim the way babies are often named by their parents in moments of emotion. Rather, tropical storms are assigned names by a committee through a regimented process.
Lala is a traditional Hawaiian name that was chosen by a panel of meteorologists who develop rotating lists of storm names. The lists are managed by the World Meteorological Organization. As tropical storms develop, they receive names sequentially from these lists, and they carry those names if they intensify into hurricanes, as Lala did on Saturday.
Lala, which translates to “branch” or “the limb of a tree” in the Hawaiian language, was the next approved name on a list for storms that develop in the Central Pacific.
It’s not to be confused with a storm that also formed this week called Hernan, which on Saturday was a weakening tropical depression in the North Pacific Ocean.
“Names help people pay attention, and are especially helpful when there are multiple storms happening at once,” Elizabeth Adams, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center, said in a video for the center.
Short, distinctive names are chosen to ensure that messages warning the public about the storm are clear and easy to grasp.
There are separate lists for different regions of the world where tropical storms develop. In the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific, alphabetical lists of alternating male and female names are recycled every six years. The 2026 list will pop up again in 2032, for example.
Tropical storms that develop in the Central Pacific, as Lala did on Thursday, are assigned Hawaiian names.
The list continues from one season to the next until it ends, and then a new list comes into play. The next storm to develop in the Central Pacific will be named Moke (MOH-keh), and the one after that Nolo (NOH-loh).
If a storm is especially deadly, such as Hurricane Iniki, which hit the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1992, the name gets retired.
The United States began naming storms in 1953, initially using only female names and adding male names by the late 1970s, Ms. Adams said.
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