Hiding in a basement or fleeing down the Interstate from Hurricane Sandy’s wrath sounds a bit silly.
Here in the south and midwest we don’t name storms. The weather adversary says a tornado is coming and we run like hell to the storm shelter or basement. We don’t need cutesy names for tornadoes and storms.
Same thing for snow or ice storms. No names required. You prepare, buy lots of food and hope the power doesn’t go out.
Why give names to hurricanes and tropical storms?
A tornado lasts a few hours. There’s seldom a need to refer to particular ones: There’s either a tornado, or there’s not. And if there is a need (usually in retrospect), you can identify it by a date and a location. A hurricane, though, lasts for weeks, spans a large part of a continent, and there are often multiple hurricanes active at once. How would you make statements like “Hurricane Sandy is expected to hit South Carolina this Saturday”, or “Hurricane Katrina caused billions of dollars in damage along the Gulf Coast” without naming them?
All the good numbers were taken.
Cecil discusses storm names. But not why they got started. At some point some bureaucrat had the idea of naming storms.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/844/who-decides-on-the-names-of-hurricanes
What was the very first named hurricane or tropical storm?
I see that the names are useful for record keeping.
Until recently, storms had only female names. People also refer to ships and planes as “she,” so I’m wondering whether this practice can be traced to the old days of seafaring, when sailors had to face the wrath of storms much as they - in their sexist way - would face the ire of a woman.
Not really. At first storm names were given sort of at random and often named after a ship they damaged or otherwise affected so that would tend to favor female names. But then the practice arose of giving Northern Hemisphere storms female names beginning with A each year and Southern Hemisphere storms male names. I suspect that the vast most of the world’s population that worries about sexism lives in the Northern Hemisphere (of course the vast majority of all the world’s population lives in the north, but I mean above and beyond that even) and wasn’t even aware of this.
Well, numbers would work perfectly fine as identifiers, but we don’t tend to remember numbers as well as names. Why do you go to “boards.straightdope.com” instead of 209.104.5.198?
“Ok East Coast, please watch out for Hurricane 2012-A27! It is closely mirroring the track of Hurricane 2006-12 and we all remember how much damage that caused! Also, mariners please note that Tropical Depression 2012-A26 is still active at <coordinates>. In other news, it appears that Tropical Storm 2012-A29 which has formed in the southern Caribbean will dissapate over the next few days - much like 2012-14.”
Record keeping goes back before then. Up to the mid-20th century (1950s), at least in Puerto Rico (but I suspect the custom was prevalent in other Caribbean countries), the storms were given the name of the saint whose day it was the day the storm landed. Which led to male names like San Felipe (1928), San Ciriaco (1899), and San Ciprián (1932). Of course, those are the big storms which names survive, there probably are other San Ciriacos and Felipes that happened in other years.
I hope it was Hurricane Eve.
Isn’t that what we call the night before the hurricane?
I recall an interview with one of the fellows who developed the naming system. By the 50’s the US weatehr service could track weather events more precisely and follow events. (Necessary, obviously, to give warning when they approached the USA) One fellow remembers theyw ere trying to keep track of 3 or 4 events in the Carribean at once; after a few hours of “the one currently over Haiti” or “the one approaching St. Kitts” one of the fellows called them by girl’s names starting with A, B, C… that made it easier to track. (I suppose Able, Baker, Charlie were already in use as radio codes).
From then on, he weather service used that protocol to name tropical storms.
Why them? Obviously, as mentioned above - unlike storm fronts or tornados, these things linger for a week or more, and cover a lot of distance before they die, and multiple events can be active at once, so a way to specify them was necessary.
The way I heard the story, US Weather Service forecasters started naming hurricanes after their wives/girlfriends as a joke. It evolved into a standardized process, but the female-only names practice remained for many years.
I’ve wondered why they don’t use the year and the phonetic alphabet.
2012-Alpha, 2012-Bravo, etc.
Well, the mega-'cane of all time, the Great Hurricane of 1780 (200+ mph winds, 20,000 dead) is also known as San Calixto II. Since I don’t think there are two Saint Calcis or whatever, I think the naming must mean the second hurricane to pop up on Dia de San Calixto.
NOAA explanation here. The earlier method was to give the storm’s lat-long coördinates, which was confusing when dealing with a moving object.
We onomastic enthusiasts prefer to think that toponomy enthusiaist George Stewart played an important rôle, having given a woman’s name to a tropical storm in his 1941 book Storm.
Is Sandy female, or male?
Sandy is female; it was preceded by Rafael and will be followed by Tony (if there’s another Atlantic tropical storm this year).