日常英語 趕快躲 C 阿比蓋爾號暴風(fēng)雨即將來臨

你會給一場強(qiáng)大暴風(fēng)雨起個什么名字？想不出來？沒關(guān)系。

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Go home and shut all the windows because Abigail is coming! In this case, Abigail is not a very angry lady, but the name of a storm chosen by the public in an initiative by the UK weather service, the Met Office, and its Irish counterpart Met Eireann.

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In the last few months they have compiled a list of names suggested by ordinary people. In alphabetical order, Barney is next, followed by Clodagh. You might find Katie down the line, and also Nigel.

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The idea of giving peoples' names to storms is to make people more aware that bad weather is on its way – and it is more understandable than giving them the latitude and longitude. Following a convention by the US, no storms will be given names beginning with the less common letters: Q, U, X, Y and Z.

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The National Hurricane Center in Miami has officially been naming the Atlantic's tropical cyclones since 1953 – men's names were included in the 1970s. But the list is maintained and updated by the World Meteorological Organization, a UN agency based in Geneva.

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Names of storms considered too catastrophic are 'retired' and replaced. No more Katrina – the name of the devastating hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 in the US in 2005. Cyclones are upgraded to hurricanes if they reach 119km/h.

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But what happens when there are too many storms in the world in a particular year? Julian Heming, tropical predictions scientist at the Met Office in the UK, explains: "If the remainder of the season is very active, it's not out of the question we'll have to... start using letters from the Greek alphabet."