From their press release
The Weather Channel announced today its new naming system for winter storms, making it the first national organization in North America to proactively name winter storms. In time for the start of the winter season, naming storms makes communications and information sharing easier, enabling consumers to better understand forecasts that could significantly affect their lives.
“On a national scale, the most intense winter storms acquire a name through some aspect of pop culture and now, social media, for example Snowmaggeddon and Snotober,” said Tom Niziol, winter weather expert for The Weather Channel Companies. “Retrospectively naming lake effect storms has been a local success at The National Weather Service office in Buffalo, NY as well as with Weather Services throughout Europe and we believe it can be a useful tool on a national scale in the U.S.”
The Weather Channel has the meteorological ability, support and technology to bring a more systematic approach to naming winter storms, similar to the way tropical storms have been named for years, staying true to its mission to keep the public safe and informed in times of severe-weather events. During the winter months, many people are impacted by freezing temperatures, flooding and power outages, travel disruptions and other impacts caused by snow and ice storms. The new naming system will raise awareness and reduce the risks, danger, and confusion for consumers in the storms’ paths.
A group of senior meteorologists chose the 26 names (one for each letter of the alphabet) on the 2012-2013 winter storm list. The only criteria: choose names that are not and have never been on any of the hurricane lists produced by the National Hurricane Center or National Weather Service. Naming will occur no more than three days prior to a winter storms expected impact to ensure there is strong confidence the system could have a significant effect on large populations.
In North America, only hurricanes, which are the biggest weather systems on the planet, have been proactively named using a system that has been effective in preparing consumers during the tropical season. The winter naming system will raise consumer awareness, which will lead to better planning and preparedness, resulting in less overall impact – in the same way that names for topical systems raise awareness.
Visit http://wxch.nl/SyPRDs for the complete 2012-2013 winter storm list.
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Over at the Washington Post, The Capital Weather Gang isn’t that impressed. Jason Samenow writes:
But one of the more convincing criticisms of the storm naming initiative I’ve seen originates from Chris McMurry, public relations director for MGH, a Maryland-based advertising agency. His thoughtful blog post – headlined “At the Weather Channel, It’s Marketing First, News Second” is worth reading. The gist of his argument is that TWC may do its audience a disservice by (intentionally or unintentionally) prioritizing “branding” over substance.
A key excerpt:
What makes this Weather Channel decision more about marketing than news is that it, as a ratings-generating television network, gets to set the parameters for what makes for a “name-worthy” winter storm. In essence, there is a profit motive in exclusively branding severe weather events that have the ability to destroy homes and claim lives.
. . .…in this situation, it appears The Weather Channel is driven more by creating a branded product, complete with fancy graphics, than in delivering weather news in the clearest, most commonly understood way, which is what The Weather Channel should stand for. Marketing is important for any business, but when it gets in the way of your mission, perhaps it goes too far.
Full story at WaPo here.
Here’s the list of names they came up with:
Athena: The Greek goddess of wisdom, courage, inspirations, justice, mathematics and all things wonderful.
Brutus: Roman Senator and best known assassin of Julius Caesar.
Caesar: Title used by Roman and Byzantine emperors.
Draco: The first legislator of Athens in Ancient Greece.
Euclid: A mathematician in Ancient Greece, the father of geometry.
Freyr: A Norse god associated with fair weather, among other things.
Gandolf: A character in a 1896 fantasy novel in a pseudo-medieval countryside.
Helen: In Greek mythology, Helen of Troy was the daughter of Zeus.
Iago: Enemy of Othello in Shakespeare’s play, Othello.
Jove: The English name for Jupiter, the Roman god of light and sky.
Khan: Mongolian conqueror and emperor of the Mongol empire.
Luna: The divine embodiment of the moon in Roman mythology.
Magnus: The Father of Europe, Charlemagne the Great, in Latin: Carolus Magnus.
Nemo: A Greek boy’s name meaning “from the valley,” means “nobody” in Latin.
Orko: The thunder god in Basque mythology.
Plato: Greek philosopher and mathematician, who was named by his wrestling coach.
Q: The Broadway Express subway line in New York City.
Rocky: A single mountain in the Rockies.
Saturn: Roman god of time, also the namesake of the planet Saturn in our solar system.
Triton: In Greek mythology, the messenger of the deep sea, son of Poseidon.
Ukko: In Finnish mythology, the god of the sky and weather.
Virgil: One of ancient Rome’s greatest poets.
Walda: Name from Old German meaning “ruler.”
Xerxes: The fourth king of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, Xerxes the Great.
Yogi: People who do yoga.
Zeus: In Greek mythology, the supreme ruler of Mount Olympus and the gods who lived there.
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I have to think though that with a list like that, which looks like a cross between the movies Star Trek, Harry Potter, and Clash of the Titans, it is going to raise more guffaws than ratings. I know major snow storms bury people alive, but really, Khan?
Well, it might bring more attention to the amount of winter cold…
but they are likely to run out of names awful quick….
BTW, the “Weather Channel” ought to change their name. A decade or two back it was all weather all the time, so you could be in a hotel somewhere, turn it on, and know if you have a weather issue at your airport, or at the other end (or in between if traveling by car). It was a great service then. (Prevented me from being caught in a Rockies storm once). Now you MIGHT get weather, but most of the time is some “Wearthery Entertainment” with catastrophe stores about folks doing stupid things. For that I could watch the History channel, or should I say “the space alien channel” 😉
I rarely look at the Weather Channel for weather anymore. I just hit the web instead. After all, I want WEATHER, not “The hurricane of 1931” or whatever…
Ah yes. Here (northern Japan) the snow storm starts in late December, and stops (normally) in early March. We have a name for it: “winter”.
Great, the mid-Atlantic to northeast big storms are almost always two or three storm systems converging on some front. The really big snows in 77 and 78 had a freezing rain producer from the midwest joining up with a gulf coast low that drug large amounts of gulf moisture up the east coast. The two systems linked up over central/eastern Kentucky and dropped about three feet of snow from Indiana to Delaware, and proceeded up the east coast. How do you name such a storm?
The weather channel used to be a decent place to look at how weather systems were interacting. Now it never does the weather and is worse than watching the network morning shows on its “weather” coverage, and worse than that it almost never has weather on.
Ten years TV free. Eschew sensationalism.
NBC owns TWC which they bought for 3.5 billion; they also bought Weather Underground. Sure it’s easier to hype a storm with a name. It’s easy to remember Blizzard Barry vs. the blizzard of ’99. Make no mistake about it; the Weather Channel is all about hype. Take a look at the colors used to indicate temperature….80 F is now dark red as though it’s life threatening. It’s only going to get worse under NBC ownership.
Do I have to mention “derechos”? Zeus, Poseidon and Aeolus prefer “eυθεία γραμμή ανέμου”.
Uzi
John says:
October 3, 2012 at 3:18 am
Sheesh. What’s wrong with “The blizzard of 1888 ” (NYC), “The Christmas Blizzard” (Denver, 1982), “The Blizzard of ’49″ (Nebraska), etc.
It took my years before I figured out exactly what my wife called the Blizzard of ’78. She was living in the midwest at the time, and my Blizzard of ’78 was a nor’easter that couldn’t have had an impact that far west. It turns out that I had it too, but in New England it was a mostly rain storm that was between the unnamed snow storm that set the 24 hour record in Boston and our Blizzard which broke that 24 hour record. All three storms could have used names, though that first one didn’t come with the hurricane force winds that made our blizzard so destructive, or the timing that made it so disruptive.
Names are useful, but winter storms can be named after the fact. Tropical storm names are useful to help distinguish between them when there are multiple storms wandering around. Winter storms tend to be one at a time, so “the yet-to-be-named storm” is almost always unambiguous.
I have no trouble with a private entity naming storms, but us Libertarians are like that (there’s nothing in the US Constitution that reserves that right to the government, after all!) However, what television station will use those names and run the risk that their viewers will switch over to The Weather Channel to see what the fuss is all about. Perhaps they’ll eventually become the authority on naming winter storms, but we’ll see.
garymount says:
I was driving in it. It’s not really a snowstorm, more a drizzly rain with occasional globs of slightly frozen crystals. Nothing is accumulating on the ground, which is still warm from a wonderful month of above average September.
I do remember some epic snowfalls in Calgary that probably wouldn’t hurt to be named: the spring blizzard of 86 (several feet of snow, which is always unusual here), the January snowfall of 89, and the St. Patricks Day blizzard of 98. Nothing really of note since then, though. You’d almost think things were stabilizing or something.
I imagine that more people are going to think of Star Trek the Next Generation, when they hear Q, than think of a NYC subway line.
This is beyond ridiculous! Another reason NOT to use the Weather Channel (or the Weather Underground) for my daily weather information.
So the Weather Channel is getting ready for the drop in temperatures, huh? Seems that’s all well and good but we’re still going to boycott ‘The Weather Channel’ affiliates anyway.
Scaring (def: to fill, especially suddenly, with fear or terror; frighten; alarm) children with their “pop culture” sensationalism of named snowstorms is a real psychological sickness on The Weather Channel’s part. What in the world was the Weather Channel thinking of?
This is all about fright and terror. Adults used to just “grin and bear” the snow for the kids sake, it was a fun time for them, misserable for the adults. I think this idea is really sick, sick, sick.
In the spirit of the Superbowl, how about:
Snowjob I, II, III, IV etc.?
There is no objective standard of what is a blizzard as there is no objective standard of what is a drought. There is an objective standard of hurricane and a hierarchy, but the hysterical hyperboles would measure them in inflating damage dollars. Eschew sensationalism.
Did they really think people were going to buy those explanations for “Q” and “Rocky”?
I don’t see that naming the storms ahead of time will work. Seems like we never know they are going to be memorable until after the fact. I foresee a lot of named duds.
I actually like the idea.
With hurricanes I can easily associate the names with events which happened elsewhere in North America in previous days – e.g. “the wind and rain we are seeing are from the tail end of hurricane x which came up through the gulf coast 4 days ago”.
It would likelier I would be aware of the progress of winter storms in a similar fashion if they were named.
Man, the History Channel isn’t even good enough to be the Space Alien Channel any more, now it’s all rednecks chopping down stuff, driving over stuff, or buying stuff at yard sales. Aliens are relegated to H2 now (which used to be awesome when it was History International). Weather Channel in the morning is fine, but during prime time it’s basically useless drivel. Remember the TV Guide channel that used to have TV listings… go figure? Now it has the worst of the worst of reality shows and, shocking, no TV listings. All I can say is thank god for Netflix streaming.
But yea, this is fine just so we don’t have to listen to babbling noggins using stuff like Snowzilla, Snowmageddon, and other banalities that make me want to stick ice picks in my ear drums. Any idea what the criteria will be? Who will be the first to retroactively catalogue the past winter storms so they can immediately declare that the winter of 2012-13 is the worst ever?
Drenchos, who ever came up with that should be beat with a rubber hose. Who knew we could get long lines of thunderstorms in the summer?
I had to go and check that it really was their ‘official’ list of names and explanations, because it was so lame. Thought someone was making it up to show how silly the names were… nope! A Subway in New York? Really? One mountain in the Rockies? Whose job was it to compile this list? Someone’s kids? Was it a school paper that got out of hand?
The reasons against doing this have been put forth by more knowledgeable posters, and they make sense. TWC is a joke.
So aside from now being able to scream “Khaaaaaaaannn!” out my car window when stuck in an impossible winter commute, and being able to quip that we are out “finding Nemo” when the forecast 2 ft. fails to fall, is there any point to this aside from alarming people? It seems to me that people around here never fail to take a forecast seriously and always bolt for the nearest hardware and grocery stores at any hint of precipitation in winter. On another note, is it true that homeowner’s insurance carries specific exemptions for named storms, and if that’s so, will this affect them? I guess I better check.
While they’re at it, maybe they should name eclipses, too.
I remember snowstorms in the 70’s. Mom worked at the hospital and I remember thinking it was cool that she was picked up by snowmobile and taken in to work. She was terrified but did it anyway. We lived in a suburban area and it was normally very illegal to drive a snowmobile within city limits.
In the future, will this era be known as the ” Alarmocene”? Or the more accurate (as shown by PBS commenters ) the “Idiocene”?
Yogi: I’m smarter than the average TWC employee. Yay, hay, hay, HEE!
Another leap in the advancement of weather forecasting. Now if the Weather Channel could only predict precipitation over 3 days in advance, I’d be thrilled. So far this year I have seldom seen Weather Channel’s 5 day forecast for my locale remain the same for more than a day. They are terrible. The worst.
There is a parallel in logical deduction between CAGW and “Ancient Aliens”.
This all showbiz. I know because when I was Meteorologist at WLS, The ABC station in Chicago, in the earky 1970s I was building ratings with all the showbiz gimmicks I could think of. So I started naming the winter storms that hit Chicago after noteable local figures. It was a hit. I named one for the best known columnist in town and he responded by having me hit in the face with a pie while his photographer snapped the pictures. It made lots of publicity for both of us. I dominated the TV ratings. He dominated the newspaper. In a way this proves there is nothing new…But in fact there is a lot that’s new. Its on our smart phones.
Without criteria about what comprises a “named winter storm”, every winter storm that produces at least one snowflake will receive a name.