Scribbled on a tatty piece of sub-atomic ether,
Martin Rowley at m wrote:

Adrian D. Shaw at wrote:
Could we possibly have another abbreviation for Tropical Storm? I
read
the subject and thought someone was giving a weather report of a
thunder storm in Firenze.

"Rob Overfield" wrote in message
. uk...
Adrian

Adrian, thats the official designation from National Hurricane
Centre. You
going to tell them to change?? )

... a pity that when deciding on the METAR code letters for a
thunderstorm the powers-that-were (1950's??) decided to use 'TS'
rather than base it on the Beaufort letters for a thunderstorm 'tl'
(i.e. a mix of 't' for thunder heard & 'l' for lightning seen, thus
making 'TL'). Unfortunately we're stuck with it. However, often in
operational use, the 'TS' for tropical storm has been written as
'T/S' which could be a work-around within the newsgroup.

(From an old book I have dated 1938, in the US, the abbreviation for a
thunderstorm when transmitted on a teleprinter was simply 'T', with
qualifiers *after* the letter, thus a 'mild thunderstorm' was
transmitted as ' T- ', a 'severe thunderstorm' as 'T+'. In the same
section, the note " TORNADO: always (underlined) written out in full".


Interesting, Martin, thanks for that.
--
Rob Overfield
Hull
http://talkingtoomuchagain.blogspot.com