As Cyclone Fani makes landfall, here's how it got its name and the other options that were on the table

On Friday, cyclone Fani made landfall in coastal areas of Odisha. It is termed as one of the worst cyclones in 20 years and more than one million people have been evacuated.

While there has been a lot of confusion on the pronounciation of "Fani", the IMD press release highlighted that Cyclone Fani is pronounced as "Foni".

The name Cyclone Fani was suggested by Bangladesh and it means snake. It was picked from a pre-determined list.

Cyclones are named by various warning centres to provide ease of communication between forecasters and the general public. The names are intended to reduce confusion in the event of concurrent storms in the same basin.

For tropical cyclones developing in the North Indian Ocean, southeast Asian countries like India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan and Thailand send their names to the regional tropical cyclone committee.

At present, all eight countries have submitted eight names each for naming future cyclones. The name Fani was chosen from this list containing 64 names.

Generally, once storms produce sustained wind speeds of more than 61 km/h, names are assigned in order from predetermined lists depending on which basin they originate.
The name for this cyclone was suggested by Bangladesh. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has devised a mechanism where countries submit a list of names from time to time. Names of cyclones are chosen from this pool.

There is a strict procedure to determine a list of tropical cyclone names in an ocean basin by the Tropical Cyclone Regional Body responsible for that basin at its annual or biennial meeting.

There are five tropical cyclone regional bodies:

1. ESCAP/WMO Typhoon Committee
    
2. WMO/ESCAP Panel on Tropical Cyclones
    
3. RA I Tropical Cyclone Committee
    
4. RA IV Hurricane Committee
    
5. RA V Tropical Cyclone Committee.

The WMO has also highlighted that tropical cyclones or hurricanes are neither named after any particular person nor with any preference in alphabetical sequence.

It adds: "The tropical cyclone names selected are those that are familiar to the people in each region. Obviously, the main purpose of naming a tropical cyclone/hurricane is basically for people easily to understand and remember the tropical cyclone/hurricane in a region, thus to facilitate tropical cyclone/hurricane disaster risk awareness, preparedness, management, and reduction."

Here's the list submitted by the eight Southeast Asian countries:

(details from WMO)