"FOR my part," wrote the pirate and adventurer William Dampier as far back as 1687, "I know of no difference between a Hurricane among the Carribee Islands in the West Indies and a Tuffoon upon the coast of China or in the East Indies, but only the name." Three hundred years later, his assessment has stood the test of time.
"Hurricane" and "Typhoon" are both local names given to a phenomenon known generally as a tropical revolving storm. When such a storm occurs in the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic it is called a hurricane in the China Seas and in most parts of the Pacific they are called typhoons, in the Indian Ocean, they are known as cyclones," and near the coasts of north Australia they are willy willies. Tropical storm Greg, therefore, which caused such devastation on the northeast corner of the island of Borneo on Christmas Day, was merely a hurricane by any other name.
Whatever they are called locally, tropical storms develop over the warm waters near the equator on the western sides of the world's great oceans - with the single exception of the South Atlantic Ocean, where they are quite unknown. They usually move westwards at first, and then north or north east leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. As it moves further north into a cooler environment, however, or over land where its supply of moisture is cut off, a tropical storm gradually loses energy, and dissipates as quickly as it formed.
Tropical storms generally develop towards the end of the hottest season of the year in each locality - the peak of the hurricane season in the Caribbean, for example, being from late August until mid-October. But to this rule, too, there is a big exception: typhoons in the north Pacific Ocean, although they peak in frequency in the period from late July to early November, are not unknown at any time of the year. Hence the otherwise unusual occurrence of this Malasian tropical storm in the northern hemisphere on a Christmas Day.
Perhaps because they occur, throughout the entire 12 months, tropical storms are more frequent over the north Pacific than over any other ocean in the world. An average of 22 per year occur, and sometimes many more - a frequency nearly three times that of Caribbean hurricanes. Because of this, two sets of alphabetical names are needed almost every year. In 1996, the alphabet has already been exhausted once, and six names had been taken from the second list before "G for Greg" was used for the Malasian storm.