Hundreds of years ago, hurricanes in the West Indies were named after Catholic saints. For example, on July 26, 1825, a hurricane hit Puerto Rico. This day was the anniversary of Anna, the mother of the Virgin Mary, so the hurricane was called "Santa Anna." At the end of the 19th century, an Australian meteorologist named tropical storms after people. However, the names were not from people he liked, but from politicians he hated? This way he could tell the public that so-and-so "caused huge disasters." disaster" and "wandering aimlessly over the Pacific Ocean."
In 1941, Random House published George Stewart's novel "The Storm". The protagonist of this best-selling book is a storm that was born in the southeastern waters of Japan and eventually hit the United States. It tells the story of "her" growth, adventure and death in her 12 days of life. In the story, a clerk at the San Francisco Weather Bureau named "her" Maria because he felt that each storm had its own personality, just like a girl.
As a result of this novel, the practice of naming storms after girls became popular during World War II, with U.S. Navy and Air Force meteorologists calling storms after their wives or girlfriends. Therefore, starting in the 1950s, naming storms after people gradually became a formal practice. At first, all female names were used. In the 1970s, male names were added, used alternately, and arranged in alphabetical order. For example, Hurricane Jeanne was followed by Karl, then Lisa and Matthew.
A new scheme has been adopted for naming typhoons in the Pacific Northwest since New Year's Day 2000. The list is submitted by members of the World Meteorological Organization's Typhoon Committee and is not arranged alphabetically by the name itself, but by the first letter of the submitting country or region. The bigger difference is that most of them are not names of people, but names of gods, constellations, flowers, plants, animals, birds, trees and even food, and some are adjectives. For example, typhoons since this summer include "Dianmu", "Dandelion", "Tingting", "Compass", "Catfish" and "Ma'an", etc. When the author wrote this article, "Scorpion Tiger" and "Lotan" were operating at sea. Names provided by mainland China also include "Dragon King", "Wukong", "Wind God", "Du Juan" and so on. The list is recycled, but if a typhoon causes great damage and becomes very famous, in order to prevent confusion, the World Meteorological Organization will consider "putting the name into another book and never renewing it."