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Science Diction

How Do You Name A Hurricane?

Science Diction

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Friday, Society & Culture, Science, Origin, Culture, Words, History, Word, Language

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How did we wind up with a storm named Iota? Well, we ran out of hurricane names. Every year, the World Meteorological Organization puts out a list of 21 names for the season’s hurricanes and tropical storms. But this year, the Atlantic hurricane season was so active that by September, we'd flown through the whole list of names and had to switch to the Greek alphabet. Thus, Hurricane Iota became the 30th named storm of the season. We’ve only had to dip into the Greek alphabet once before, in 2005. But the practice of naming hurricanes goes back to the 19th century, and it was a bit of a bumpy ride to land on the system we use today. In this episode: The story of a meteorologist in Australia, a novel, and a second-wave feminist from Florida—and how they brought us hurricane names. Guests:  Christina M. Gonzalez is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.Liz Skilton is a historian and the author of Tempest: Hurricane Naming and American Culture. Footnotes & Further Reading:  For more hurricane history, check out A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America's Hurricanes by Eric Jay Dolin. To learn more about Roxcy Bolton and the fight to change the naming system, read Liz Skilton’s article “Gendering Natural Disaster: The Battle Over Female Hurricane Names.” Credits: Science Diction is hosted and produced by Johanna Mayer. Our editor and producer is Elah Feder. We had story editing from Nathan Tobey, and fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our composer is Daniel Peterschmidt. Chris Wood did sound design and mastered the episode. Special thanks to the Florida State Library & Archives for allowing us use footage from Roxcy Bolton’s oral history interview. Nadja Oertelt is our chief content officer.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey there. Today's episode is about hurricanes. And the reason that we decided to look into this is because a little while back we got an email from a listener named Kevin Kirtin. It said, since it's hurricane season, we've been discussing cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, and what each word means and why we have different words for what is basically

0:21.7

the same weather system. Good questions. So hurricanes and typhoons are the same weather

0:28.6

system, a tropical cyclone, which is a big, fast, rotating storm. And I'm simplifying a bit here,

0:35.6

but generally, it's just about geography.

0:39.2

When a tropical cyclone happens in the western Pacific, we call it a typhoon.

0:43.9

One theory is that the word typhoon comes from the Chinese typhung, which basically means big or great wind.

0:51.8

And when a tropical cyclone happens in the Atlantic near the U.S., it's called

0:56.2

a hurricane. I'll get into that a little later. So we're going to use both of these terms in this

1:01.5

episode. I'm talking about the same weather system just in different parts of the world.

1:08.7

All right, here's the episode.

1:12.8

Leave it to 2020 to put us in a weird weather situation.

1:17.9

We ran out of hurricane names.

1:21.6

Well, kind of.

1:23.2

So every year, the World Meteorological Organization puts out a list of 21 hurricane names in alphabetical order.

1:31.0

So 2020 started with Arthur, ended with Wilfred.

1:35.1

We skip less common letters like X and Z.

1:38.2

But by mid-September, we'd already reached Wilfred.

1:42.8

We'd flown through all 21 names, with two months of hurricane season left to go.

1:49.5

So, what do you do when you run out of hurricane names?

1:53.6

You bust out the Greek alphabet.

1:56.1

Hurricane Alpha, Beta, Gamma.

1:58.8

As of this recording, the most recent hurricane of the season?

...

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