Ten days ago a worker at my office I had never seen before knocked and walked in. Everyone wears Aloha shirts on Fridays so I didn’t know if he was a lawyer, maintenance worker, cop, business leader, or politician. There are some extra privacy and confidentiality precautions and a separate location for my workspace, so it kind of surprised me. I don’t get a lot of unexpected visitors. He said “I’m here for the typhoon” as if I knew what he meant. At that point, there was a tropical depression1 that was developing rapidly but was several hundred miles away, headed to hit the chain and predicted to make landfall on Tuesday. Since the maintenance staff were not working on “Austerity Monday,” they were securing the shutters now. He pointed out the window where there were folded up currogated steel accordion shutters. I had just thought they were for shade. I helped open the windows and lock them down. The casualness of this and ease of the precaution made me think that this was a very regular occurrence.
Typhoons and hurricanes are the same storm in different oceans. They do not hit in Europe, so the term was derived into English after contact with the people who experienced these storms by the European seafaring powers. The Portuguese adopted the word “tufão” from the Chinese word "tàifēng," which means "great wind" or "big wind." The Spanish word “huracán” came from the Taíno word "hurakán." The Taíno were the Caribbean indigenous people on the islands first struck by Colombus and the term may be their biggest modern legacy. They were the people on Hispaniola2 Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica. Hurakán was name of their god of storms and the storm itself. Before you consider this to be backwards, consider Storm:
Hurricanes have a rating system I was familiar with, the Saffir-Simpson, where Category One is the weakest and Category Five the strongest. However, this is really not that helpful, since it just refers to wind speed.
I heard several different descriptions of how strong Mawar was that didn’t track to my understanding of categories. This is because the Japanese Meteorological Agency and the American Joint Typhoon Warning Center3 use different systems. In this part of the world, specifically within the Northern Hemisphere between the international dateline (anti-meridian) and 100°E are officially monitored by the JMA. They use this scale, also based on wind:
One fluke of this - and the metric system - is that, at exactly 74 mph, the same named storm system could be considered a category one typhoon in one part of the American Pacific and a tropical storm in another.
Because these storms do not care who which country happens to control the land you are on, you tend to carry on those terms. As such, the Koreans tend to use the terms from JMA and the Philippines use the JTWC. The Philippines even uses the American naming conventions though this part of America does not-- Mawar is called Typhoon Betty and is near the Philippines now. The island is 30% Filipino, all with family back home. As such, most of the language in broadcasts reflected the Japanese system, though often there would be an explanation of it in the more familiar terms after, as you would give currency or units of measurement.
Here is a link to the episode of Everything Everywhere Daily about Hurricanes and Typhoons.
The size of the hurricane, its overall speed, the rainfall, and the locations of landfall all are huge contributors to how to prepare. Meteorologists and public planners use all of these factors, but the general public thinks in the Safire-Simpson categories. I was in Corpus Christi in the lead up to Hurricane Harvey (I evacuated to Austin), which made landfall as a Category 4 storm. Fortunately, it missed the densely populated part of the region, but rural towns like Refugio and coastal ones like Port Aransas had many buildings destroyed by high winds. However, it was after the storm had rapidly lost power (as they do when they are not in the ocean) and settled as a Category 1 and then out of hurricane categorization entirely that it did the most damage, parking over the Houston bayou and its encircling counties of former-floodplain, now-suburb and causing unfathomable flood damage.
Recognizing this, there have been some competing proposed alternates. One is the Hurricane Severity Index (HSI) developed privately and the other is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy scale proposed by the National Weather Service. Both of these assign a numerical value with more factors and more degrees commensurate with our improvement in obtaining and tabulating data. Hopefully one of these will be more widely understood to better help non-specialists prepare.
As is common, there is also terminology that has emerged in the Western Pacific to relate to the storm that is more accessible to the people actually living it. When Mawar passed, people called it a ‘Banana Typhoon.’ This is a storm windy enough to blow down a banana tree. This is obviously bad in places with bananas as a dietary staple or agricultural industry, as in 2012 with Typhoon Bopha wrecked the Philippine crop. But here it is contrasts with a ‘Supertyphoon’ which is when winds are over 150 miles an hour. This is handy, since we refer to Hurricane Katrina with the same term as not just the other four Category 5 hurricanes that hit during the 2005 season, but all 15 of the named storms that made it to at least 75 mph winds. Everyone on island refers to the devastating 2018 storm as ‘Yutu’ or ‘Supertyphoon Yutu’ but never its official name - ‘Typhoon Yutu.’ But a banana typhoon is better since it blows over the banana trees in contrast to the hardier trees with deeper roots in firmer soil. You could see how apt the term is from my front door.
These are a form of anthropometric or human-based measurements. These include not just things based on the physical body (cubit, foot) but also experience, like a morgen (how acreage a man can till in a day behind an ox) or a “dog year” to help age a pet. Taking the science out of it helps real people. They already do this with amounts of rainfall - often given in ‘Olympic-sized swimming pools’ or hail, given in the ‘golfball’ or ‘baseball’ size and officially described by the government as such. They should adopt this for wind-speed too - give me an ascending scale of what it will knock over. Maybe they will have to change the tree that they use by region - though I can’t imagine they use ‘baseball’ to describe hail in France, for example.
Here is my rough proposal, in ascending order of how hard the wind would have to be to knock you over.
Professional soccer player
Beach Tent
Straw House
Wood House
Brick House
Andre the Giant
Tropical Depression is also the name of my ukulele emo band.
This is the island on Columbus first landed and on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are situated.
“Joint” does not mean “International” but rather a combination of different branches of the American armed forces, in this case the Navy and Air Force.