Wow.

[pat]

I wasn't paying attention, but...

Hurricane Wilma became a Cat-5 briefly yesterday, setting a new record for barometric pressure. For a while, it was the strongest hurricane ever recorded.

*boggle*

It has since weakened. It is expected to hit the Yucatan, and then head for southwest Florida. Still... a Cat-5? in late October? Shouldn't we be having mostly Cat-1s or 2s by now?

My God. We'll be having storms until Thanksgiving at this rate. There must be a lot of heat still left in the Caribbean waters for storms to be this strong this late in the year.

This is the first time that the name list has been exhausted, since they began naming storms in 1953 (they don't assign names for x, y, or z). After this, we move on to Greek letters. Which brings up an interesting point: if we are entering a period of intense hurricane activity, and we have subsequent years this bad, how do they differentiate between very late storms that are very bad? It's not like you could retire a letter, could you?

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Perhaps we could use names from ancient Greek legends...? Andromache, Baetis, Cassandra, Diana, Euterpe...

I'm hoping we never see Hurricane Pi, and wondering what gets used if we run out of Greek alphabet. Russian?

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

I like that idea. Except that some names -- such as Diana -- are already in rotation or have been retired. But there would always be Dionysus....

[bdot.livejournal.com]

i read here (http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12947369.htm) this morning that the warm water goes "down about 300 feet or more thanks to what oceanographers call the Loop Current, which pumps warm tropical waters clockwise through the Caribbean into the Yucatan Channel and the Gulf of Mexico."

apparently this loop current is sticking around longer than usual and keeping the "hurricane breeding grounds" active!

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

When I was little, I laughed hard whenever I heard or read this, and I don't think I knew why:

"Why don't they name hurricanes after men?"
"Then they'd never get past the Virgin Islands!"

[bdot.livejournal.com]

what about the gender balance. mva actually asked if we would use greek myth names (we had this discussion in the car last night!) and then she figuered that there wouldn't be enough male and female of the same letters..... and what happens when one gets retired? use the roman name instead?

[bdot.livejournal.com]

LOL

[joedecker.livejournal.com]

Not Hebrew (Phonecian, Coptic...), I think (aleph/alpha'd be too easy a confusion.) It'd be nice to have long names easily pronouncable by English/Spanish speakers for Atlantic hurricanes, so I'd avoid the tone-based languges, and Latin (and Cyrillic?) because the letter names are short?

Here's a wacky one--how about Mayan Day names, or Month names?

Days: Imix, Ik', Ak'bal, K'an, Chikchan, Kimi, Manik', Lamat, Muluk, Ok, Chuwen, Eb, Ben, Ix, Men, Kib, Kaban, Etz'nab, Kawak, Ahaw.

Months: Pohp, Wo, Sip, Sotz', Sek, Xul, Yaxk'in, Mol, Ch'en, Yax, Zak, Keh, mak, K'ank'in, Muwan, Pax, K'ayab, Kumk'u, also Wayeb (which was kinda special).

(There are a lot of transliteration styles of those names, this is one randomly chosen, there are simpler ones, but it would be important to pick one, of course.)

No question that they'd be a new to pronounce, and they're not 'common knowledge', but Mayan is at least locally appropriate, and the names would not (for English users) be easily confused with other words or situations.

(I'm strangely pleased I'll probably live to see the opportunity for the Mayan Year 13.0.0.0.0 bug to occur.)

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

And you must have noted also that Tampa/St.Petersburg is in the 5-day tracking strike probabilities cone, albeit to one side...?

[patgreene.livejournal.com]

Yes, I had noticed that. I don't need that right now. Which is, admittedly, a selfish point of view, but I really don't need the added stress of worrying about Mom.