Imagine this. A network of 15 weather stations – linked by cellphones – that will measure weather parameters such as air temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, rainfall and solar radiation. Then imagine the data transmitted every 30 minutes to a central site, i.e., the main office of PAGASA.

Then imagine no more. Just be patient, and wait for the memorandum of agreement, recently signed between the Philippines and Taiwan, to take effect as soon as the budget is released by Taipei to the tune of US$280,000, or 90 percent of the total cost (with the Philippines shouldering 10 percent).

The donation could not have been more timely. All of a sudden, it’s not “weather-weather lang,” climate no longer a blah subject of conversation since it became one-half of the buzzword referring to mankind’s most urgent concern, climate change. Taiwan, with whom we have no diplomatic relations, acknowledges that while the donation is a one-sided arrangement, they stand to benefit mutually from the automatic collection of meteorological data from remote collections all over the archipelago.

Remember, the distance between Batanes and the southernmost tip of Taiwan is a mere 200 kilometers, often the basis for the myth that when a cock crows on our northernmost tip, it’s the cue for Taiwanese farmers to wake up. (Or is it the other way around?)

As sure as the cock crows at sunrise, in an interconnected community where viewers of CNN in South Africa receive news of flooding in Metro Manila at the same time as a college student in Makati, we have to ask why our weather bureau has for the longest time – like 11 or 12 years – refused to go global in the way it names storms and typhoons. What is so special, so magical or musical about Ondoy and Pepeng, if by sticking to those pet names we confuse and inconvenience the global Filipino? Nationalism?

What’s so exotic or national about Jolina?

No man is an island, no typhoon is local anymore.