www.alphadictionary.com

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a nice piece on naming hurricanes:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca ... ne-snooki/

Why don't we just give them all year and alphabet names? 2014-A, B. C, and so forth? What is the importance of a human name here?

There is a long explanation for the naming of tropical cyclones at this link
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/tcp/Storm-naming.html
In summary, it ain't as simple as all that.
But the people in charge think that names are easier to remember than numbers and less prone to error, particularly when "exchanging detailed storm information between hundreds of widely scattered stations, coastal bases, and ships at sea" (At any one time there can be several storms active in a region.)

Note that in theory the powers that be select names familiar to the people living in and around the relevant basin.

Having said that, the Japanese Meteorological Agency and the Japanese popular media refer to tropical storms by their number with the counter reset to zero on January 1.

Typhoon No. 8 (the 8th tropical depression to develop in the NW Pacific this year) will be in the Tokyo area tomorrow morning at about 6 AM. We have battened down the hatches and taken in the plants on our roof garden.