Must not give hurricanes female names

Weather bureau to consider research showing female-named storms seen as less threatening

Weather authorities in Australia are considering further investigation of how they name cyclones, after US research showed people take the threat of female hurricane names less seriously than male-sounding names.

Alan Sharp, the manager of tropical cyclone warning services for Australia at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the organisation would look at the US data and may decide to do similar research in Australia.

He made the comments after the ABC forwarded him a copy of the work by a US team, which included contributions from experts in psychology, statistics and gender studies. "We will have to get someone onto it," Mr Sharp said.

He said an investigation of the data to see whether it had relevance in Australia could be quite expensive, and given Australia's best-known cyclone, Cyclone Tracy, had a female-sounding name, it is possible the results would not translate in Australia.

The research out of America published last year looked at more than six decades of death rates from US land-falling hurricanes and found that the more feminine the name of the hurricane, the more people it killed.

"Simply put, the name of a storm affects how risky it is perceived to be," said Professor Sharon Shavitt from the University of Illinois, who was one of the report's authors.

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