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While roaming the web in the small hours of Tuesday morning, I listened to Billie Holiday. She was crooning "Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather, since my man and I ain't together, keeps rainin' all the time", when I came upon this story:
"Tropical Cyclone Hits Australia
"CAIRNS, Australia (AP) - The most powerful storm to hit Australia in decades laid waste to its northeastern coast on Monday (March 20), mowing down sugar and banana plantations and leaving possibly thousands of people homeless."
Well, it being autumn down under, Australia is prone to tropical storms this time of the year. That is hardly surprising. What struck me was the "cyclone" in the headline. That word gave me a lot of trouble many years ago.
It was this way. A beat reporter covering the weather had written that a certain hurricane hit Taiwan, Guangdong and Fujian provinces, causing injuries, damages and so forth. By hunch, I, working as a copy editor at the time, changed "hurricane" to "typhoon" which led to this question from my puzzled younger colleague, who thought the two terms meant the same thing and were therefore interchangeable.
"Don't both mean tropical storm, or cyclone?" he asked.
They do. Just that hurricanes don't ever visit this part of the world. Typhoons do.
However, at the time, I couldn't explain it well, only saying meekly that the safe thing always was to stick with "tropical cyclone", i.e. "a tropical storm with winds up to 120 kilometers per hour hit Taiwan Tuesday morning."
Truth be told, even today, after having looked up many more papers on the subject, I am not sure that I have come to any definite terms with the lot of them - cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, and all that jazz - except that I am quite convinced that either weathermen throughout the world are collectively insane or that they intend to drive the general public (laymen like you and me) toward that direction.
One of my biggest findings is this: Hurricanes, tornadoes, typhoons are indeed more or less the same thing. They are all tropical storms (everyday language), or tropical cyclones (jargon). They are, in short, the worst stormy weather on earth.
Stormy weather, as we know it through our daily (or rather yearly) experiences, seems easy enough to grasp when common sense prevails and we are allowed to call a spade a spade.
The word "storm" itself comes from Old English "styrian", meaning to stir. Hence we understand a storm to be severe weather caused by an atmospheric tumult, or the air being in a bad way, behaving badly and throwing tantrums left, right and center, much like a poor example of a single-child in China - when they don't have their wish granted by fair means, they'll do it by foul.
At any rate, when a storm is marked by strong wind, we have a windstorm. When it also rains, we have a rainstorm. When it's coupled with thunder and lightning, we have a thunderstorm. When hailstones are involved, folks in the city are delighted to duck under the roof and observe a hailstorm. In winter, when the rain is replaced with ice, we have a snowstorm.
When dust is whipped by the wind, as is normal in Beijing in all seasons, we have a dust storm or a sandstorm when the situation becomes extreme. Beijingers accuse, often unfairly, the northern lands in Inner Mongolia and beyond of being responsible for the loss of visibility in their beloved city. In my view, littering construction sites all over the place in town are the main culprit.
So far, this has been easy to grasp. But, when it comes to tropical storms (the most tempestuous of all storms, summertime or winter) and when we let meteorologists into the picture, well, the picture begins to blur immediately.
In the eye of the pro, all tropical storms are cyclones (caused by the rotation of a volume of air of low atmospheric pressure). The word "cyclone" is derived from the Greek word "kyklon" (circle). This much is fair enough.
However, when a tropical cyclone forms in the Western Hemisphere, it is by tradition called a hurricane (from Spanish "huracan" meaning the storm god). When formed in the Western Pacific, it is called a typhoon (probably from the Chinese term Tai Feng - 颱風 - The character "颱" possibly means wind from Taiwan, 台湾, as typhoons are indeed blown in from the direction of Taiwan, as seen from the standpoint of people on the mainland). In the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, including Australia, it is called a tropical cyclone.
Since all tropical storms are graded by their sustained speed (a hurricane referring, for example, to winds of 119 kilometers per hour or higher), you and I wonder why weathermen won't make their lives (and ours) easy by addressing them thus. That way, reporters can readily say, for example, a tropical storm with winds up to 100 kilometers per hour is going to hit the southern coast later today.
However, this is decidedly not what weathermen of the world intend to do, at least for the time being. You should look at the way they name all their lovely hurricanes and typhoons to be able to fully appreciate the great lengths they go to in order to make their work look like such a fine mess.
According to WMO (World Meteorological Organization, the international governing body of global storms - I like this description), in the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific regions, feminine and masculine names are assigned alternately in alphabetic order during a given season. The "gender" (if you don't mind) of the season's first storm also alternates year to year: the first storm of an odd-numbered year gets a feminine name, while the first storm of an even-numbered year gets a masculine name. Six lists of names are prepared in advance, and each list is used once every six years.
All the names are Greek to us too, if you don't mind - Alu, Buri, Dodo, Emau, Fere, Hibu, Ila, Kama, Lobu, etc.
And of course, don't forget Katrina, which wrecked havoc to New Orleans (the Jazz town, come to think of it) in 2005.
Yes, please remember Katrina. She could be "retired", if you don't mind.
Yes, as though things are not complicated enough, they "retire" names too (so that future practitioners will HAVE TO come up with even stranger names, if that were possible).
Yes, I'm not making any of this up. According to WMO's naming schemes, names of storms may be retired by request of affected countries if they have caused extensive damage. The affected countries then decide on a replacement name of the same gender (if you don't mind) and if possible, the same ethnicity (if you don't mind) as the name being retired.
Ah, well, the point is, for more mazy rules and information, send no questions to me.
Send them instead to World Meteorological Organization directly. I'm sure their men have the time, while working in between cyclones, to explain everything to you.
Me? I'm going back to Billie. Having weathered all these storms, I find the voice of the melancholy Lady Day even more soothing.
Just "Fine and Mellow".
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