4.8 • 610 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2020
⏱️ 22 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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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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