With hurricane off Mexico sharing name with Vice President JD Vance, the social media memes fly

As Vice President JD Vance travels the U.S. supporting Republican candidates in next month’s election, another Vance is on a whirlwind tour off Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

The storm named Vance that strengthened into a hurricane on Friday is not actually named after the vice president, despite a flurry of social media comments linking the two.

Vance just happened to be next on a list of Pacific storm names devised by the World Meteorological Organization, the United Nations’ weather agency. It follows Trudy, which also reached hurricane strength off Mexico last week.

Storm systems are named by procedures set by the WMO, and the lists of names are reused every six years. For the North Atlantic and eastern North Pacific regions, the lists are alphabetical and alternate male and female names.

Representatives from the vice president’s office, the WMO and the National Hurricane Center did not immediately respond to email messages Friday.

Social media commenters joked about the hurricane and vice president having the same name. Many of the posts included photos showing the vice president’s face in the eye of the storm.

When Tropical Storm Dolly formed in the Atlantic in August, online reaction was swift and voluminous as it came two days after Dolly Parton’s death. It also was the case that the storm was not named after the country music icon.

The WMO manages the naming of tropical storms worldwide. The names come from a set of pre-agreed alphabetical lists decided by five tropical cyclone regional bodies. Some of the lists are in a rotation, with the same roster of names being used every few years, while others start a new list every year.

The WMO says naming storms is important because it’s been proven “the fastest way to communicate warnings and raise public awareness and preparedness,” as well as limit confusion when more than one cyclone is moving through. They can also help with research and record-keeping. (The WMO’s Hurricane Committee does not use less common names beginning with Q and U for storms in the eastern North Pacific.)

If any other storms form in the eastern North Pacific this year, they would be named Winnie, Xavier, Yolanda and Zeke.

The next chance for another storm to be named Vance will come in 2032.

The last Hurricane Vance came in 2014, also off Mexico’s Pacific Coast. The National Hurricane Center called it a rare November Category 2 storm that dissipated before making landfall. Another Hurricane Vance developed in the same area in 1990 but didn’t hit land, the center said.

If storms are particularly devastating, either by death toll or damage, their names can be retired and replaced with new ones on the lists.