Everyone talked about her in 2005. She’s so famous she doesn’t need a last name. Just mention her name and people stop to listen. Who is this celebrity? Is it Madonna? Is it Angelina? No, it’s Katrina. But she’s no singer or movie star.

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in August 2005, killing at least 1,300 people. Katrina caused about $75 billion in damage to the southeastern United States. No one who was alive during this storm will forget the name Katrina.

But how exactly did this hurricane get that name to begin with? Randy Cerveny is a climatologist at Arizona State University. He says the hurricane naming system began in the 1800s.

The U.S. Air Force began formally naming storms in the 1950s. They used the names of pilots’ girlfriends. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) later took over the process. Officials at the WMO created six lists of names for each region. Each list contains 21 names. The lists start with each letter of the alphabet except for Q, U, X, Y and Z. At first, the WMO only used female names. Public protest made them change the system in 1979. Since then, they have alternated male and female names.

The first storm of the season always starts with A. After that, the storm names follow the list in alphabetical order. If there are more than 21 storms in a season, any extra storms will be named using the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, etc.

After going through all six lists the WMO goes back to the first list and starts over again. If a storm is particularly destructive, its name gets retired, just like a famous athlete’s jersey number. For example, there will never again be another Hurricane Katrina.

The WMO naming system is not used everywhere on Earth. For example, on the east coast of Asia they use the names of flowers and old gods. But everywhere you go, people want to give storms some kind of name. “The reason we name hurricanes is because people pay more attention to a name than a number,” explains Cerveny. When people are in danger and need to evacuate a town, getting their attention can be a matter of life and death.

Even the name “hurricane” isn’t used everywhere. The general name for all hurricane-type storms is “tropical cyclones.” In the Atlantic Ocean, they are called “hurricanes.” In the Pacific Ocean they are called “typhoons.” Off the coasts of Australia and India, the storms are called “cyclones.”

But all these names describe the same weather process. “A hurricane is basically a big heat engine. It pumps hot water from the ocean and converts it to rain and heat,” Cerveny says. “ Almost all hurricanes start off as a dust storm. Usually they originate in Africa and work their way off the African coast into the Atlantic Ocean. Most fall apart without ever reaching the Americas. A few start to take on a form that causes more development,” he adds.

Once a storm reaches 39 miles per hour, it becomes a tropical storm and gets a name. When it reaches 74 miles per hour it qualifies as a hurricane.

Scientists aren’t sure why some storms become hurricanes while others die off, but they are trying to learn. As soon as a storm starts to spin, the National Weather Service sends some of the best pilots in the world to fly right through it. This is a risky business. Cerveny hasn’t flown through a hurricane, but he has flown through an Arizona thunderstorm in a hurricane hunter plane. “They tell you not to eat breakfast and to take Dramamine (a drug for motion-sickness),” he says. “The plane is basically a modified commercial plane. The seats have been taken out and replaced with computer workstations. Instead of a seat belt you wear a harness. You go up to 50,000 feet and down to about 18 feet off the ground and up to 50,000 feet again. It beats any roller coaster hands down!”

The planes drop instruments into the storm to get information. Scientists also use satellite data for information. “But we still need people willing to risk their lives and fly through the middle of these things,” Cerveny says. “Each time we do we learn new stuff and our forecasts get better.”

Most damage from a hurricane comes from what is called the “storm surge.” A hurricane’s low pressure sucks up water from the ocean, lifting it above sea level. Then the water floods over the land. During hurricane Katrina, the worst of the storm surge was 25 feet high. “It’s like a big bubble of water under the hurricane. It’s kind of like a tsunami but it’s not just one wave that comes in and recedes. It just keeps coming in underneath the hurricane,” says Cerveny. “One foot of water moving at 10 miles per hour can move a Hummer.”

Hurricanes generally don’t affect Arizona, but in 1997, Hurricane Nora hit the Pacific coast and caused about 5 inches of rain in Yuma. “They were actually sandbagging and teaching people how to tape their windows,” says Cerveny. “It dried out before it got to Phoenix. It was very odd.”