Hurricane Central

The Next Tropical Storm Is Helene. Here Is That Name's Hurricane History.

At a Glance

The next Atlantic tropical storm will be named Helene.
This name has been used in the Atlantic Basin since 1958.
That 1958 Helene struck North Carolina at Category 4 intensity.
Other notoriously destructive "H" storms have been retired, including Harvey and Hugo.

Sign up for the Morning Brief email newsletter to get weekday updates from The Weather Channel and our meteorologists.

The next tropical storm in the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season will be Helene, a name that has history dating to the early years of naming tropical cyclones.

Where it is in the list: Helene is the eighth storm name in the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season list.

On average, the eighth storm of the season usually arrives by Sept. 9, according to the National Hurricane Center's (NHC) 30-year climatology from 1991 through 2020.

(Further beef up your forecast with our detailed, hour-by-hour breakdown for the next 8 days – only available on our Premium Pro experience.)

The most recent Helene: Six years ago, 2018's Helene became a tropical storm just 12 hours after it moved off western Africa on Sept. 8. According to the NHC's report, this development so soon off of Africa was rare. Only 10 other tropical cyclones formed farther east than Helene in 2018.

It later became a Category 2 hurricane west of the Cabo Verde Islands before it curled sharply north into the eastern Atlantic Ocean.

Other Atlantic Helenes: Including 2018, there have been six Helene storms in the Atlantic Basin in the last 65 years, all plotted on the map below.

Two of these struck the U.S. mainland. Tropical Storm Helene came ashore in the Florida Panhandle on Sept. 21, 2000, then swept through the Carolinas and Virginia Tidewater two days later.

In late Sept. 1958, the edge of Category 4 Hurricane Helene's eye came within 10 miles of the coast at Cape Fear, North Carolina. While it never made landfall, the intense eyewall raked the N.C. coast. A gust to 135 mph was the highest on record at the Weather Bureau's office in Wilmington, North Carolina. Helene's winds, storm surge and rainfall flooding inflicted an estimated $11.2 million damage (1958 dollars) in the Carolinas,

According to the Weather Bureau's final report, "The Carolina coast missed a potential disaster of the first magnitude by a very close margin."

(For even more granular weather data tracking in your area, view your 15-minute details forecast in our Premium Pro experience.)

Helene was nearly retired: Tropical storm and hurricane name lists in the Atlantic Basin repeat every six years unless one is so destructive and/or deadly that a committee of the World Meteorological Organization votes to retire that name from future lists. This avoids the use of, say, Katrina, Sandy or Maria to describe a future weak, open-ocean tropical storm.

If that 1958 Hurricane Helene's path would have been 10-20 miles farther north and west, the storm surge and wind damage may have been worse than 1954's Hurricane Hazel.

And that would have meant 1958 would have been the only Atlantic Basin Helene.

If 2024's Helene isn't too destructive and deadly, that name will be used again in the 2030 Atlantic hurricane season.

Other "H" storms retired: From 1954 through 2023, 96 names have been retired from future use.

Six of those were "H" storms, most notably Harvey (2017) and Hugo (1989). The others were Hattie (1961), the aforementioned Hazel (1954), Hilda (1964) and Hortense (1996).

Helene was not used six years after the 1958 hurricane. Instead, in 1964, Hilda was the name given to what became a destructive Gulf Coast hurricane that prompted the retirement of that name.

That's because the six-year name list recycling procedure began in 1979.

Numbers of storm names retired by first letter from 1954 through 2023. There have been six "H" storm names retired, less than half of the number of "I" storm names.
(Data: NOAA/NHC; Graph: Infogram)

So, in summary, 1958's Hurricane Helene was very nearly destructive enough to be retired. Helene could have also been retired six years later in 1964, but Hilda was used instead for the H storm that year.

MORE ON WEATHER.COM

-The US Hurricanes Many Have Forgotten

-Cat 1 Hurricanes Are Dangerous, Too

-Why The Planet Needs Hurricanes

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. His lifelong love of meteorology began with a close encounter with a tornado as a child in Wisconsin. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on X (formerly Twitter), Threads, Facebook and Bluesky.