Adopt-a-Vortex

In the aftermath of tropical cyclones Floyd and Glenda in the Pilbara last year The Chaser ran a sketch about corporate naming rights to weather systems. In the sketch Julian Morrow approaches NAB, AWB, the ALP and others offering to sell them the branding rights to the next major cyclone (‘Glenda’ being, after all, a name that conjures up canteen-lady-in-orthopaedic-shoes-and-a-lilac-rinse, not potentially razing natural catastrophe – although I doubt that anyone out on the rigs had that image in their heads during the storms). If you felt a certain sadness that the Chaser boys didn’t coming knocking at your office door, if somewhere deep in the atoms of your heart you thought how nice it would be if one day your name came up on the cyclonic register, you can wipe away that frown! You can now Adopt-A-Vortex!

That’s right, for the equivalent of $AUD317.73-$477.40, you can buy the rights to name a European weather cell. The price range accords with whether you want to adopt a high or a low pressure system. Interestingly, the lows are cheaper despite the fact that they produce the most impressive weather. The guidelines for names are relatively generous and the whole transaction is concluded by means of facsimile (if the name is ‘free’ and has not yet been claimed) or by ebay bidding if more than one individual wants to claim a specific name. Once you’ve purchased your vortex you can follow its origin, course and demise on the German Institute of Meteorology website. After the destruction is complete and your vortex has devolved from fire-raining tempest into a simpering eddy on the corner of the map, you are provided with a birth certificate and a post-mortem document that diarises its short and terrible life. Nothing says I love you like the coroner’s report on a vortex named after your loved one or your favourite pet! “I made that sunset for you", you can whisper one lazy night on the beach, knowing that your personal vortex is building a soft metropolis in the sky to be torn into a storm the next morning. Think of the potential to find romance in climatic apocalypse! Swooning against your lover under skies rent asunder by your namesakes. The kiss of your low and high pressures manifest in bright bolts of actual symbolic allegory! Or, alternatively, take pleasure in seeing your vortex chew on the ruins of your enemies - lightning nests, earthquake weather, firewinds are all newly at your disposal!

Unfortunately it seems that the current foster parents of vortexes do not share my vision for the potential of naming their progeny. The most recent name for a low pressure system? Lupus'. The firmament as autoimmune disease. I suppose that it could be stretched to dovetail with the whole Gaia hypothesis in the context of global warming and extreme weather conditions, but seriously, lupus? Or maybe there’s something quasi-voodoo going on there, whereby someone actually suffering lupus has given that name to a cyclone in an attempt to purge the illness from their body in the same way that cancer suffers will name their tumours ‘Egbert’ or ‘Marla’. I am, however, looking forward to cyclone Ralph and the Otto blizzards of 2008…

The naming of weather cells seems to me to be just another step along the continuum of anthropomorphising the natural world and correlatively, trying to bring it under our overt control as an agent of culture. Privatising that process further impels the belief that this is possible. Just as only cartography can render local usage into international standard, the institutions of meteorology play a much larger role in universalising discourses about the weather than merely predicting its local manifestations. Is radical meteorology the next logical progression from radical cartography? Certainly surreal things are already happening in the world of government-sponsored weather modification. In Russia they seed the clouds with chemical reagents to prevent it raining in the capital on national holidays. As far back as the Goodwill Games in 1994 Saint Petersburg’s Geophysics Observatory was involved in ‘cloudbusting’, to keep the sun shining over competitors. And if you really want to read something vertigo-inspiring, sit down with a G & T and peruse “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, a report actioned by the US Airforce in 1996. It covers the hard science as to how drought might be instigated in drug-producing regions, how fog might be rolled in to obscure sensitive military activities and how storm systems can confer technological advantages on a force with better surveillance equipment. Most awe-inspiring, it looks at the uses of near-space in modifying the weather. And this was 1996.