Gale in the context of "Tropical cyclone naming"

Tropical cyclones and subtropical cyclones are named by various warning centers to simplify communication between forecasters and the general public regarding forecasts, watches and warnings. The names are intended to reduce confusion in the event of concurrent storms in the same basin. Once storms develop sustained wind speeds of more than 33 knots (61 km/h; 38 mph), names are generally assigned to them from predetermined lists, depending on the basin in which they originate. Some tropical depressions are named in the Western Pacific, while tropical cyclones must contain a significant amount of gale-force winds before they are named in the Southern Hemisphere.

Before it became standard practice to give personal (first) names to tropical cyclones, they were named after places, objects, or the saints' feast days on which they occurred. Credit for the first usage of personal names for weather systems is generally given to Queensland Government meteorologist Clement Wragge, who named systems between 1887 and 1907. When Wragge retired, the practice fell into disuse for several years until it was revived in the latter part of World War II for the Western Pacific. Formal naming schemes and lists have subsequently been used for major storms in the Eastern, Central, Western and Southern Pacific basins, and the Australian region, Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean.

A gale warning is an alert issued by national weather forecasting agencies around the world in an event that maritime locations currently or imminently experiencing winds of gale force on the Beaufort scale. Gale warnings (and gale watches) allow mariners to take precautionary actions to ensure their safety at sea or to seek safe anchorage and ride out the storm on land. Though usually associated with deep low-pressure areas, winds strong enough to catalyze a gale warning can occur in other conditions too, including from anticyclones, or high-pressure systems, in the continental interior. The winds are not directly associated with a tropical cyclone.