HURRICANES
EVERYTHING
WORTH
KNOWING
74 DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
A Monster of a Name
Remember hurricane EP022018? Of course not. While tropical
depressions are stuck with staid technical descriptors, it’s a
long-standing tradition to also give hurricanes human names.
The rationale is that anthropomorphizing makes it easier for
both scientists and the public to talk about major storms. But
it wasn’t always that way.
Hurricanes were once named somewhat arbitrarily:
sometimes after the saint’s day on which they occurred, other
times after geographical locations they hit. Then, around
WWII, meteorologists began informally assigning storms
female names, and the United States began using an official
list of feminine names for Atlantic hurricanes in 1953. The
gender barrier was finally broken in 1979, when men’s names
were added to the list.
Today, the list for the Atlantic consists of six rotating
sets of 21 names maintained by the World Meteorological
Organization. The first hurricane of the season gets a name
beginning with the letter A, the second starts with B and so
on, with alternating female and male names.
Different regions of the world have their own lists, so don’t
be surprised if you hear about a Hurricane Sergio or Omeka.
The lists won’t ever change, though, except in the case of an
especially destructive storm — those names are retired out
of respect.
Taking up Modeling
Hurricanes are so big, it must be easy to predict what they’ll do,
right? Not quite. Meteorologists rely on a few different weather
models to peer into a hurricane’s future, and the computations
are devilish. The models in question simulate weather across the
entire planet, but if the scientists were to use all the variables and
data possible, even supercomputers wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Instead, they simplify. They’ll take an average
value for, say, the behavior of clouds
and assume all clouds act that way.
Since different models simplify the
atmosphere in different ways,
they sometimes disagree.
The “big three” for
predicting hurricanes
at the moment are the
European, U.K. and U.S.
weather models. Though
the European model is
usually the most accurate,
it’s still not right all the time.
The best predictions come
from combining forecasts from
all the models. When it comes
to predicting hurricanes, there’s
strength in numbers.
Hurricane Ivan on
September 15, 2004.Possible paths
projected for
Hurricane Isaac
in August 2012.