The National Weather Service and the National Hurricane Center are rolling out new maps and updating products to reflect the official new name of the Gulf of Mexico which is now called the Gulf of America. On February 10, employees at the federal Board on Geographic Names formally changed the name to the Gulf of America in response to an Executive Order previously issued by President Trump.
On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14172 known as “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness”. Among other actions, that Executive Order required the Secretary of the Interior, acting pursuant to 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f, to “take all appropriate actions to rename as the ‘Gulf of America’ the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the State of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico.”
The Board of Geographic Names which is responsible for making names of places official, completed their efforts to update their systems to reflect the new name. Since then, private sector and government agencies have been busy to update their systems to do the same.
Google and Apple updated their internet-based map products this week. But even before the change became official on February 10, several state and federal entities started to refer to it by its new name immediately after the President’s Executive Order on the name change.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was among the first officials to use it in an official capacity, including the new name in an emergency declaration. On January 20 he wrote, “… an area of low pressure moving across the Gulf of America, interacting with Arctic air, will bring widespread impactful winter weather to North Florida beginning Tuesday, January 201, 2025.” Other Governors have used the Gulf of America name since then too in everything from official documents to postings on X.
In the weather enterprise, the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center was one of the first to use the name in weather products. On January 29, they included mention to the new name of the Gulf in their daily Convective Outlook.
Now the rest of the weather-related agencies with the government are doing the same, with the National Hurricane Center updating their maps and products yesterday. On the NHC website, the new image of the Atlantic basin now shows the new label for Gulf. The NHC’s daily tropical outlook, which through Wednesday still referred to the body of water as the Gulf of Mexico, referred to it as the Gulf of America yesterday. It included a “Gulf of America Gale Warning” discussing a cold front that extended from the Florida Panhandle to just north of Veracruz, Mexico.
The Gulf of America is often the place where the hurricane season’s earliest storms take shape. The 2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season begins on June 1, giving forecasters and the public the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the new name prior to the start of the season.
To celebrate the official new name, the President made a holiday for it. February 9, 2025 became the first ever “Gulf of America Day.” “I took this action in part because…the area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico has long been an integral asset to our once burgeoning Nation and has remained an indelible part of America,” the President wrote in his proclamation. “Today, I am making my first visit to the Gulf of America since its renaming. As my Administration restores American pride in the history of American greatness, it is fitting and appropriate for our great Nation to come together and commemorate this momentous occasion and the renaming of the Gulf of America.”
