Automatic – open-weather

2024-09-30 17:19:00

Prototype Automatic Ground Station 2

Vienna, Austria

Austria

NOAA-15

"Helene Has Killed More Than 90 People. Here Are Some Of Their Stories" read the New York Times headline. I tried to recall if I had heard of the serial killer. Woman serial killers make headlines as the embodiment of evil – women who choose to take life, rather than reproduce it. I realised that I knew Helene. She had been seen a week ago in the Gulf of Mexico, before making landfall over the Big Bend of Florida's Gulf Coast, churning out death and destruction in her wake. Helene was a hurricane. Her first name was Potential Tropical Cyclone Nine, given to her by United States meteorological service on 23 September 2024. A day later, as she grew in strength and her personhood took shape, they renamed her Helene. In writing about plants, Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer observes that “names are the way we humans build relationships, not only with each other but with the living world” (Kimmerer 2013). My home country, the UK, began naming storms in 2014, following the US which had started giving tropical storms female-only names in the 50s. It took decades of feminist fighting for the US meteorological service to assign storms names coded male too (Skilton 2018). Lately, I have been thinking about the power of naming and names to affect real-world relations. I read a British study that compared named and unnamed storms of similar strength, and found that there were fewer cars on the roads during the named storm. The study's authors reason that this is because of the media event that formed around the named storm, possibly saving lives (Charlton‐Perez 2019). In North American and European nomenclature, storms are named at their geographic origins. If a storm named by the US meteorological service crosses the Atlantic and reaches the UK, it will retain its American name. What if, I wonder, we were to reference a different origin? For example, social, historical or political? In ‘Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)’, Rebecca Solnit argues that to name is to “diagnose” and so to transform our ability to speak about a subject, even articulate our relations to it (Solnit 2018). What if, rather than naming storms after each other, we traced their social origins? One outcome could be that unusually large storms, such as Helene, are named after the extractive industries that make their existence statistically so much more likely. If Hurricane Helene had been introduced to us as Hurricane ExxonMobile or Storm Shell how might our relations to such 'extreme weather' events be changed? To name storms after Big Oil feels as offensive as it is flattening. Yet current naming practices fall short too. It would be apt if, in media coverage, mega storms sounded less 'woman serial killer' and more 'corporate killer' or 'colonial menace'. Could such an expressive exercise help us grasp our role as "weathermakers" (Neimanis 2014), to diagnose the social-political origins of today's weather, and so articulate our relations, our knotty response-abilities to it?

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