ORLANDO, Fla. – The 1992 hurricane season was a notoriously quiet one in terms of the number of named storms. Only seven storms formed that year. Unfortunately, one of those storms was Andrew.
Andrew became one of four category 5 hurricanes to make landfall in the U.S., coming ashore in southern Miami-Dade County.
Did you know, however, that Andrew would have had a different name if current naming policies from the National Hurricane Center were in place?
Another one of those seven storms from the ‘92 season was a subtropical storm that formed in April.
Subtropical storms are hybrid storms that meteorologically consist of both tropical and non-tropical characteristics. Prior to 2002, the National Hurricane Center did not name subtropical storms, they were just numbered.
Subtropical storms were still included in the overall number of storms for a given season, just not named.
Starting in 2002, the National Hurricane Center began naming subtropical storms.
Had the NHC been using the policy in place today, that subtropical storm in April would have received the name Andrew. Andrew would then have been named Bonnie, the second storm of the 1992 hurricane season.
News 6 Meteorologist Candace Campos lived through Hurricane Andrew as a five-year-old girl. Click here to read her story as the eye of the storm passed over her family’s home on Aug 24, 1992.
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