As cyclone Hudhud moves towards the Andhra Pradesh-Odisha coastline, the name of the superstorm has triggered a lot of curiosity.
Hudhud is the name of an elegant bird mostly sighted in Oman and other Gulf countries. According to Met department officials, it was Oman which had contributed the word to the pool of names given by Asian countries, including India, for tropical cyclonic storms in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea.
When a cyclone is formed in these two oceans, it is given a name pulled out from the pool on sequential basis. Accordingly, the current cyclone has been given the name Hudhud.
Naming a cyclone has been a common practice since long in countries like the United States and Australia as well as in other western countries. The basic purpose of naming a cyclone or a hurricane or a storm is their quick and easy identification in warning messages. According to sources, the naming of cyclonic storms began in the Caribbean Islands more than a century back. People gave names to storms to remember them for long.
Significantly, naming of cyclonic storms was not done in Asian countries till 2000. That could be the reason why the super cyclone that had ravaged the entire coastal belt of Odisha on the night of October 29, 1999, had not been formally given a name.