Mountain Goat wrote:
I don't believe my name has.
Brief History Lesson.
It was traditional to name a hurricane after the first ship that sank due to the event. Therefore, if no ships sank it wasn't a hurricane.
This method had been in use for centuries. We were told that the old thatched roof came off this house in Hurricane Timotei and landed on the house opposite (That used to be there as the old house was knocked down and a new house was built in the 1980's... The neighbours house is in the sameplace about the width of a football pitch away).
Now we were able to give an exact date to this event which happened in the early 1600's by looking up the time the hurricane occurred, so we know this house predates that event. (It is very hard to find details as old maps in Wales only showed principle dwellings. Most cottages and farms were never recorded on early maps. Welsh as a language wasn't in written foem until a few hundred years ago. Everything here was by word of mouth. The knowledge of the hurricane was simply passed on to each successive house owner who owned this house.
It is only in recent years when thwy decided to change the system as in recent years ships lost at sea in a hurricae were not so frequent an event... So they decided to name the hurricanes after the first person who saw it on thw monitoring equipment as a better idea.
Dude...you all don't have true "tropical depressions". You have storms but you don't have actual hurricanes in Wales nor do they anyplace else in Europe.
Europeans knew nothing of Hurricanes until Columbus discovered the Caribbean islands.
The Chinese knew about typhoons in the Pacific. And in modern times scientists realized that typhoons and hurricanes were the same thing (tropical depressions). Just in different oceans.
Back in the day they couldn't keep track of the birth and death and wanderings of hurricanes. They had to rely on reports from ships arriving in port. That's why hurricanes could pounce on cities without warning. That's why six thousand Americans died in the unnamed Galveston hurricane of the early 1900s.
By the mid twentieth century they had aircraft and were able to keep tabs on tropical Atlantic storms. And they began naming them, but just military type names like "Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie".
But (this is what I read as a child in children's science book back in the Sixties) around 1950 someone published a comic novel about a swinging bachelor who just happened to be employed as meteorologist. He was charged with keeping track of tropical depressions. So he named his hurricanes after the many girlfriends he juggled. Apparently someone at the real Weather Service read the book and thought the story was cute, and soon the real US weather service adopted the idea of giving hurricanes female names (kinda like how ships are usually given female names).
So it became the convention to give them alphabetical female names (and by that time they also had satelites to help keep tabs on them). And that's how it was throughout my growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. Then sometime (I believe the Eighties) hurricanes went coed. And now they can have either boy names or girl names.
05 May 2019, 12:14 pm
