Forecaster’s solution was blowing in the wind

SINCE ancient times people have attributed names and personalities to storms, but giving them specific names is a more recent practice.

A building sits relatively unscathed behind a wall of debris after a hurricane devastated the city of Galveston, Texas, in September 1900. More than 6000 died and a further 10,000 were left homeless as entire neighbourhoods were swept clean from the storm.

THERE is a popular song from the ’50s that goes “And they call the wind Maria”. Written by Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, composed for the 1951 musical Paint Your Wagon, the song gives a woman’s name to an invisible but sometimes destructive force.

The characters who sing it are lonely miners in America’s Wild West, giving a woman’s name to the wind because they are lonely and yearning for women they left behind.

Meteorologists also like to name winds, particularly powerful storms like the hurricanes Harvey, Irma and now Maria in America, but for different reasons. Naming a storm removes confusion, makes it easier for weather agencies to communicate about the storm and allows people to better relate to the information the meteorologists impart.

Naming winds only began as a formal meteorological practice in the mid-20th century. But an Australian meteorologist was doing it decades earlier and giving a human element to this force of nature has ancient roots.

Most ancient people attached personalities to the wind. They believed winds were either caused by gods or were actual gods acting on the environment.

British-born meteorologist Clement Wragge migrated to Australia in 1883.

Clement Wragge in his garden in Taringa, Brisbane. Picture: State Library of Queensland

The Ancient Greeks had many wind gods, including Poseidon, who punished people with the occasional tempest. To get his winds going he had to appeal to the god Aeolus, father of all the winds. His children included Boreas, the north wind, known for winter chills; Notos the south wind brought summer storms; the west wind Zephryos brought warm spring breezes; and Euros the east wind, known for bringing the autumn rains.

The Greeks also had names for winds from the northwest (Skeiron), southwest (Livos), northeast (Kaikias), and southeast (Apeliotus). They also had monster called Typhon, with many heads and arms, thought to have influenced the English word typhoon. But typhoons are Asian storms and the word derives from Chinese “tai fung” (a great wind).

The word hurricane comes from the ancient Mayan god Hurakan (also known as Kulkukan), the creator deity who made dry land by blowing across the waters. Hurakan also destroyed bad humans with storms.

The Mayan god inspired the Taino god Hurican, a bringer of winds. The Taino were the natives of the Caribbean, and when the Spanish arrived in the 15th century they adopted the word hurican as the name for a tropical storm. As part of the cultural exchange the Spanish also brought Catholicism and, for centuries, inhabitants of the Caribbean and South America referred to particular storms by the name of saints’ days, according to the liturgical calendar. For example a storm that hit Puerto Rico on July 26, 1825, was named hurricane Santa Ana. If storms hit on the same saint’s day years apart, the earliest one would be called “the first” and the later one “the second.”

A street in Darwin shows the damage caused by Cyclone Tracy on December 24, 1974.

In the 1890s the English-born meteorologist Clement Wragge, who migrated to Australia in 1883, began naming storm events using letters of the Greek alphabet, characters from Greek mythology or girl’s names from the Pacific Islands. At times Wragge was employed as an government meteorologist but often argued with officials over what his functions should be. To get back at them he began using the names of politicians for storms.

Wragge never really developed a system for naming storms, so when he resigned from his job as official meteorologist of the Queensland Government in 1903 and failed to secure the position of Commonwealth Meteorologist in 1908, his system of naming storms, such as it was, was not adopted by those who succeeded him.

In 1941 US author George R. Stewart published the novel Storm, in which the main character is a major tropical storm. The meteorologist in the novel gives women’s names to storms and names the storm Maria (pronounced Ma-rye-ah) after a former girlfriend. The novel not only inspired the Lerner and Loewe song, but also military meteorologists during WWII to give names to tropical storms in the Pacific. Sometimes they used a standard phonetic spelling alphabet (able, baker, charlie etc.), but at other times men couldn’t resist using the names of wives or girlfriends.

The practice persisted after the war and spread to Atlantic storms. But in 1950 when there were three major storms it was too confusing using a phonetic spelling alphabet, so women’s names were adopted.

In the ’50s a more formal system of compiling a list of women’s names was implemented. The list would be cycled through, names of major storms were retired from the list and new ones added over the years. Tracy and Katrina are two that are no longer used because both were major destructive storms. However recently Isis was also dropped because of the name’s link to Islamic State.

In 1975 Australia became one of the first countries to alternate men’s names with women’s. The practice later spread around the world. There have also been efforts to make the lists more reflective of other cultures.