Weather bureau opens public naming contest, immediately regrets it as submissions arrive

QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES – The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration has exhausted its annual list of tropical cyclone names for the fourth consecutive year and has opened submissions to the public, a decision the agency described Wednesday as a mistake it made with full awareness.

Within nine hours the submission portal had received one hundred and forty thousand entries, of which the agency has confirmed that eleven are usable.

The Naming Convention Has Rules and the Public Has Ignored Them

Official guidance requires that names be short, easily pronounced in Filipino, culturally appropriate, and distinct from any name previously retired due to a storm causing significant loss of life.

Submissions received to date include the name of a popular noodle brand, the surname of a sitting senator, the phrase Tita Ko, and a single entry consisting of the word Basta submitted four thousand two hundred times by what the agency believes is one determined individual in Cebu.

Deputy administrator Nenita Aguilar-Sarmiento said the agency was grateful for public engagement. We asked for names, she said. We received a national personality assessment. These are not the same thing but I understand now how we arrived here.

The Retirement Problem Nobody Mentions

The underlying reason the country keeps running out of names is not administrative. It is that names are retired when a storm is severe enough to make the name unusable ever again, and the Philippines retires names at a rate that no naming list was designed to absorb.

The country sits directly in the path of the most active tropical cyclone basin on the planet and receives around twenty named storms in an average year, of which several will be catastrophic. Real forecasting, warning bulletins and cyclone tracking are published continuously by PAGASA, and international cyclone monitoring and climate data is maintained by the World Meteorological Organization.

The naming shortage, in other words, is a symptom being treated as a novelty story, which Aguilar-Sarmiento noted with some weariness is exactly how it gets covered every October.

The Auxiliary List Has Been Deployed

The agency maintains an auxiliary list for exactly this situation, containing ten additional names held in reserve. It has now been activated in each of the last four seasons, meaning the auxiliary list is functionally part of the primary list and the primary list is functionally a suggestion.

A proposal to simply extend the main list to forty names was rejected in committee on the grounds that it would look pessimistic. Officials preferred the current arrangement, in which the country is surprised annually by a thing that has happened annually.

Observations From the Storm Signal

• Everybody in the country can tell you what signal number closes schools, and nobody can tell you what any of the signal numbers technically measure.
• The suspension of classes is announced at approximately eleven at night, after every parent has already made a decision.
• There is always one man on the coast who does not evacuate. He appears on the news. He is always fine. He is the single most damaging influence on evacuation compliance in the country.
• The word habagat does more explanatory work in Philippine life than any three government agencies combined.
• Nobody prepares for the first storm of the season. Everybody prepares for the second, having remembered.

The Naming Contest Winner

The agency has selected a shortlist of eleven and will announce the winning submissions next month, subject to a screening process that Aguilar-Sarmiento described as necessary and lengthy.

We have to check each one, she said. We have to check that it is not a brand. We have to check that it is not a politician. We have to check that it is not a word that means something extremely different in one of the other one hundred and seventy languages spoken in this country. That last check is where we lost most of the submissions.

Weather Bureaucracy Is a Global Discipline

Other nations manage their meteorological anxiety differently but no more competently. British readers observed a masterclass when an emergency alert was issued for a temperature that would be unremarkable in Manila before breakfast, followed swiftly by the retail consequences as the population was compelled to acquire legwear at short notice.

The economic follow-through was equally instructive, with an airport losing its water supply in the same warm week, demonstrating that no country handles weather well, only differently.

Cross-border coverage of nations being defeated by their own climate appears at Bohiney Magazine, with the British material collected at the capital reporting index.

The Season Continues

Three systems are currently being monitored east of Mindanao. Two have names. The third does not yet, and the agency has confirmed that if it strengthens before the contest concludes, it will be assigned a name from the auxiliary list, which now contains four.

Aguilar-Sarmiento was asked what happens when the auxiliary list runs out. She said the agency would cross that bridge when it came to it, and then noted that the bridge in question had been washed out in 2023 and was still programmed.

Similar dispatches at NewsBiscuit.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/