One of the lesser annoyances about this winter’s multiple storms is their confusing nomenclature.
It’s a regular winter storm most places, but on the Weather Channel it’s Pax. Other local stations have even different names for it. Those shoveling up to a foot of heavy stuff in D.C. — as much as I’ve seen here in two years combined — have their own choice, unprintable names for it all.
But why does the Weather Channel in particular persist in giving names to storms that the National Weather Service does not not and will not?
Newly hired Weather Channel morning meteorologist Sam Champion says naming them provides an easier way to individualize storms as they track across the country.
Talking to reporters at the TV Critics Association press tour last month he said he at first was against naming storms. And then, he said, “I kind of started to understand a little bit more about how quickly these storms move across the country and how they are not as spread apart as they used to be, we can have more of them in a season, and, certainly, we have had in even a pre winter season.”
There are practical reasons for the network as well, he says, having to do with “the need to track them and the need in social media to track them in a way where the pictures are easy to find, where the damage is easy to find … This really works much better for a new way of tracking information like Twitter and Facebook and these ways where all the pictures will be ranked under the hashtag.’
Using a single name ma be important because “we’re talking about a storm that may move into Seattle and may get worse in Chicago and then may cause flooding and not snow and ice at all in Atlanta.”
It happened with hurricanes and “super-storms,” he says.
“Sandy dropped snow in the mountains of West Virginia and had blizzard like conditions,” Champion said. “So the reason to name a storm isn’t because you know the conditions that are expected to travel with that storm.”
Weather Channel president David Clark said, “Winter storms have been named for 50 years in Europe.” In addition, ” we think the way the world communicates has changed.”
It is odd to be out of step with the National Weather Service on this, Clark said, but he likes it when officials pick up the names they’ve given storms. “When Mayor Bloomberg gets up last year and uses Nemo in a press conference that was a surprise to us frankly and a lot of fun,” he says. “Hercules was all over the place.”
The names the Weather Channel is using for storms this year were suggested by a Latin class in Boseman, Mont., as a way to distinguish the 26 A t0 Z names.
So far, they have been: Atlas, Boreas, Cleon, Dion, Electra, Falco, Gemini, Hercules, Ion, Janus, Kronos, Leon, Maximus, Nika, Orion and the recent Pax. Still to come: Quintus, Rex, Seneca, Titan, Ulysses, Vulcan, Wiley, Xenia, Yona and Zephyr.
Last season was the first one that the Winter Channel started naming winter storms. It was a deemed a success by Bryan Norcross, senior hurricane specialist at the Weather Channel, in part because of “well over a billion impressions on Twitter.”
Some of the names on the Bozeman list were changed. Dion and Titan were shortened or modified. Cleon, Gemini, Ion, Nika, Pax, Seneca and Yona were substituted into the list because earlier names had bn retired by the National Hurricane Center, had alternate meanings or were difficult to pronounce.
This season’s list includes some names that may oversell a storm’s power (Maximus) or others previously associated with weather condiditions like “Runaround Sue” (Dion).
When it comes to winter storms, it all seems to have something to do with shoveling.
But for now, Pax out.