Met Mailbag is your chance to have a Weather Plus Meteorologist answer your weather question. Each Thursday, our NBC Weather Pulse Blog will publish the answers to questions you send us. This week's question was answered by NBC Weather Plus Meteorologist Elise Finch.

Question: I thought tropical storms were named in alphabetical order, but we've gone from Ernesto to John to Florence. Why is this? -- Dorothy Williams, Delaware

Answer: That's a great question, Dorothy, and I'm sure lots of other people were wondering the very same thing.

The National Hurricane Center names storms alphabetically and in spite of how it appeared, they didn't skip any letters or names. It just so happens that Ernesto, like our most recent storm Florence, is on one list, and John is on a different one.

Each year there is a list of names set aside for storms that develop in the Atlantic Basin and a separate list for those that develop in the Pacific. In the Atlantic ... we had only had 4 named storms, so Ernesto was the name given to the 5th storm. When Florence formed Tuesday morning it became the 6th named storm of the Atlantic season.

So far this year the Pacific has been more active with 9 named storms which is why their latest storm was named John.

Just so you know, the names are maintained and updated by an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization. Six lists are used in rotation which means the 2006 list will be used again in 2012 unless a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate. In that case the WMO will strike the offending name and select a replacement at their annual meeting.

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