If you鈥檙e a regular watcher of The Weather Channel or consumer of weather-related social media, you probably already know that the country was recently besieged by Winter Storm #Sparta before being hammered by Winter Storm #Thor.
And if you鈥檙e familiar with the naming conventions for winter storms, you鈥檒l know that they (like hurricanes) are assigned their monikers from a 26-name alphabetical list established at the start of the season.
So you might be wondering: seeing as March just started and we鈥檙e already on 鈥淭,鈥 what happens when we hit the end of the alphabet? The answer, it turns out, is simple鈥攚e start over again at 鈥淎.鈥 This didn鈥檛 happen last winter, when we only made it to Winter Storm #Zephyr, but the year before, after Winter Storm #Zeus, a freak May blizzard in the Midwest prompted a reboot with #Achilles. The year before that, of course, nobody bothered to name winter storms.
Rarely reported in the flurry of takes on The Weather Channel鈥檚 naming scheme is the actually rather charming fact that, for the last two winters, the network鈥檚 list of blizzard names has been penned by the Latin Club at Bozeman High School in Bozeman, Montana.
Plenty of has been over The Weather Channel鈥檚 three-year-old blizzard-naming schtick. The National Weather Service is not on board with it. Journalists, bloggers, and dissenting meteorologists have called it everything from 鈥溾 to 鈥溾 to 鈥溾.
On Twitter and other social media, however, the Greek- and Latin-based handles鈥攍ike #Kronos, #Neptune, #Janus, and #Nemo鈥攈ave been heartily, if sometimes ironically, embraced. And this, argues The Weather Channel, amounts to a proof of concept: the whole notion of naming storms derived from Twitter鈥檚 ascendancy and the resulting need for shorthand, explains Weather Channel executive and meteorologist Bryan Norcross. 鈥淭here isn鈥檛 any good way to describe a storm occurring in a certain region if you鈥檙e on a medium that goes everywhere,鈥 he says, 鈥渆specially when you鈥檙e limited to a 140 characters. So it was really driven by the need of a hashtag.鈥
Rarely reported in the flurry of takes on The Weather Channel鈥檚 naming scheme is the actually rather charming fact that, for the last two winters, the network鈥檚 list of blizzard names has been penned by the Latin Club at Bozeman High School in Bozeman, Montana. The students sent an unsolicited list back in 2012, says Norcross, and they were so enthusiastic about it, he鈥檚 been working with them to come up with names ever since.
One criticism often lobbed at The Weather Channel is that its naming system is needlessly alarmist, that it seems almost designed to cause panic鈥攂ecause what kind of callously indifferent school district isn鈥檛 going to preemptively cancel classes with something called #Maximus bearing down on it? For the sheer over-the-top epic-ness of storm names like #Titan, #Pandora, or #Hercules, however, we actually have the Bozeman High Latin Club, rather than The Weather Channel, to thank/blame.
The network, for its part, realizes that some names have a more aggressive connotation than others, says Norcross, but hey, there are only so many names out there that have a Classical etymology and are also sufficiently easy for your average Twitter user to spell. 鈥淪ome are kind of bracing by the nature of them,鈥 he acknowledges, 鈥渟o we think about that, but we don鈥檛 fret about it.鈥
How鈥檚 this for bracing? Up next is Winter Storm #Ultima. And if we make it past #Zelus with no sign of spring? Not to worry鈥攖he Latin students at Bozeman High have already given The Weather Channel a list of overflow names.