`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 in the name."
Dampier was quite right. Typhoon Bilis, which recently caused havoc in Taiwan, is the same phenomenon as Hurricane Debby, who as I write is threatening the southern United States. Indeed, William Dampier might well have added cyclone, another name used to describe the same lethal occurrence, this time when it occurs in the Indian Ocean. They are all local names for that which meteorologists know by the generic term of tropical revolving storm .
Although the hurricane season in the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and north Atlantic region officially lasts from June until November, it is mostly in August and September that the storms become troublesome enough to merit global notice.
Debby is the fourth sibling of the millennial family of hurricanes; Alberto, Beryl and Chris were her precursors. Debby will be followed by Ernesto, Florence, Gordon and Helene, and maybe by more in the guises of Isaac, Joyce, Keith, Leslie, Michael, Nadine, Oscar, Patty, Rafael, Sandy, Tony, Valerie and William.
The practice of informally naming tropical storms of a particular severity became common around the beginning of the 20th century. At first, the names were chosen arbitrarily, often at the whim of an individual forecaster, but in the early 1950s it was agreed internationally to give hurricanes female names in alphabetical order from the beginning of each year.
In 1979 this somewhat sexist approach was changed, and hurricanes were named alternately male and female. Each year the list contains a mixture of Hispanic, French and English names. Today is the 14th anniversary of our own Hurricane Charley. Charley was born on the coast of South Carolina on August 15th, 1986, and as it moved northwards it ceased, as hurricanes always do, to be a hurricane in the strict sense. But it retained its identity as a conventional depression and by the early hours of August 25th it had appeared, rejuvenated, about 300 miles to the south-west of Kerry. During the daylight hours it passed close to the south coast and reached Wales by early evening.
Charley produced strong winds, but these were not exceptional. However, the rainfall was. It poured down in unprecedented quantities on southern and eastern parts of Ireland, breaking long-established records and leaving widespread flooding in its wake.