First, a moment of Zen from a reader: “A man finds the rarest thing in NYC for his toddlers: unspoiled snow”:
Other readers tackle our earlier post:
Put me in the category of those who believe that naming winter storms trivializes how serious they have become. Unlike hurricanes, which are given names based on an agreed upon format (used to be all female names, now they alternate between male and female, which probably pisses off someone on the right), giving snow storms names like “Snowmeggedon” is all hype, no information. While there is no question that this winter has been weird (I like to tell my conservative friends it’s a good thing that climate change is a hoax or we’d be in trouble) you’d think the media would take them more seriously then they do, because people are being hurt and some are dying.
Another agrees:
Naming storms that aren’t hurricanes is – excuse my French – bullshit. It’s a Weather Channel marketing ploy so people can use hashtags to talk about snow, driving search traffic to TWC’s web page. It’s click-bait, pure and simple.
The names are chosen to sound scary, but unlike the National Hurricane Center names, they don’t undergo any sort of peer review. That leads them to choose really insensitive names like XENIA. What’s wrong with calling a storm Xenia? Well, it’s a Greek word for hospitality … but it’s also the name of a town in Ohio (just outside Dayton) with a history of being hit by massive damaging tornadoes. Xenia is famous among meteorologists. Nobody with any understanding of American weather history would use that name to refer to a snowstorm, any more than Boeing would build a “Model 911” commercial passenger aircraft.
Maybe I’m biased because I grew up in hurricane country, but for me, if it doesn’t spin and come yowling off the ocean like an angry cat between August and October, it doesn’t deserve a name.
Previous Dish on Weather Channel click-bait here. Another reader:
Let’s be clear that WaPo and TWC are not competing to name storms. WaPo, specifically the Capital Weather Gang (CWG), only names a few of the bigger winter storms and only after they’ve already hit. It makes it easier to refer to these events in future discussion, rather than saying “Oh hey, remember the east coast nor’easter of February 12-13, 2014?” Yeah, I don’t remember that one either. They named one storm last year, March’s “Snowquester”, and that followed a two-year lull in naming following 2011’s appropriately titled “Commutageddon”. Also, folks going to WaPo for weather news are likely those living the DC Metro area, so its names probably don’t resonate much beyond the Beltway.
What TWC is doing is far more debated in meteorological circles (CWG has a great blog post about it here, which explores both the good and the bad). The biggest beef held by most non-TWC meteorologists seems to be that such a large private, for-profit entity should not be the arbiter for naming winter storms, hoping that everyone just goes along with it. The federal government does this duty for summer hurricanes, and many feel that if we DO need to start naming storms they should be in the lead so there’s no naming confusion across different media outlets. Hurricanes are also very distinct and dangerous storms systems, with a very clear need for uniformity of advance information and warning.
However, most seem to agree that we don’t need to name winter storms since they are totally different animals, often made up of the collision of multiple high and low pressure zones across vast areas. Sure they can produce serious consequences, but TWC has named more than a few that had very little noticeable impact. You could even have multiple TWC-named winter storms combining to form one large event. How do you apply the naming for that type of event without further confusing the public?
The Dish 