DENVER — Last week, days after a bomb tornado (along with a series of atmospheric rivers, some of the Pineapple Express variety) devastated California, a downtown convention center here was flooded. Floods by the forces responsible — not due to heavy rain and wind but for forecasting.
Scores of the world’s most authoritative meteorologists and weather scientists have gathered to share the latest research at The 103rd Meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The subject line of the email to the participants on the first day predicts optimism – “Daily Forecast: A Bunch of Scientific Knowledge.”
But there are worrisome undercurrents. Scientists agree on the increasing frequency of extreme weather events – blizzards in BuffaloFlooding MontecitoCalif., stretch drought in East Africa — and their disturbing effects. At the meeting in Denver, however, there was another growing concern: the way people talked about the weather.
The widespread use of colorful terms such as “bomb storm” and “atmospheric river”, along with increasingly common categories, color and Name hurricanes and weather patterns, have struck meteorologists as a mixed blessing: good for public safety and climate change awareness but potentially amplified to the point of making the public paralysis or uncertainty about actual risk. The new vocabulary, devised by the weather science community in many cases, threatens to spiral out of control.
“Language evolved to get people’s attention,” says Cindy Bruyere, Director of the Capability Center for Climate and Extreme Weather at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She sat with two fellow scientists at a coffee shop in between sessions and grew increasingly animated discussing what she called “common words” that lacked meaning.
“I have no images in my head when I hear the term ‘bomb storm’.” “We need much clearer language, not exaggerated words,” she said.
Others find that the words, while evocative, are sometimes used incorrectly. “The worst is the ‘polar vortex’,” says Andrea López Lang, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, as she stood in the hallway between weather science sessions. Dr. Lopez Lang is an expert on polar vortex, which is technically a stratospheric phenomenon that occurs at least six miles above sea level. “But in the last decade, people started describing it as cold air above the ground,” she said.
In an effort to prevent verbosity, weather scientists have begun to study the effects of extreme weather language. How do people react to the way the weather is communicated? Are they taking the appropriate precautions? Or do they tweak it out?
It was “a hot topic,” said Gina Eosco, a social scientist with the Office of Weather Programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Literally, communication is our number one concern.” In 2021, Dr. Eosco is the author of a paper with a less compelling title, “Can a consistent message be achieved?: ‘Message consistency’ definition for weather business researchers and practitioners.”
Currently, the answer to the article’s question is: cloudy. To emphasize the point, Dr. Eosco — sitting on the floor in a hall — pulled out his phone and presented a set of announcements from multiple television stations and websites using competing graphics, colors and language to describe Tropical Storm Henri, in 2021. Dr. Eosco noted that the articles The presentations aren’t too different from each other, but they do imply a variety of approaches to inclement branding.
“I’m trying to see how people design it this year,” she said. “Basically, they’re upgrading it.”
To fully understand the impact of how people talk about the weather, more information is needed, Dr. Eosco said. Her NOAA division has issued a call for researchers to quantify the effectiveness of weather notification strategies, including “visual, verbal, naming, cataloging messages.”
The broader aim, she said, is to ensure that the official series of weather terms promotes understanding and an appropriate response from the public, not confusion.
“This weekend, I got a text from a family member saying, ‘Is an atmospheric river real?’” Williams Castle, a social scientist sitting on the floor next to Dr. Eosco; both are joint authors of the 2021 paper on consistent weather notifications. “She thought it was a made-up word for intense rain.” He added, “I gave her a lot of information about atmospheric rivers.” Dr. Eosco notes that researchers are looking into whether to group atmospheric rivers into categories, like storms that are numerically ranked by severity.
Some vivid terms begin with scientists – such as “bomb storm”. “The reason we call it a bomb is because it’s the explosive intensity of a surface storm, or in other words, winds that you’re experiencing near the ground where people live,” he said. . John Gyakuma meteorologist at McGill University who helped create the term in the 1980s. The less compelling definition is “a 24-hour period during which central pressure drops by at least 24 millibars,” is a measure of atmospheric pressure.
In the early days of the term, weather patterns were “primarily an oceanic phenomenon,” says Dr. Gyakum, and largely still are. Perhaps more people are affected these days because the coasts are more densely populated. “Why do we hear so much about tornadoes more than 40 years ago?” he say. “People are paying more attention to extreme weather than they used to.” He added, “Talking about bomb tornadoes is not necessarily indicative of increased frequency.”
According to Google Trends, the phrase “bomb cyclone” is barely spoke out until 2017 but has since become noisy, along with “weather bomb” and “weather tornado bomb.”
Some meteorologists say they have become cautious with what they say, to avoid sensationalism. “Once you use a term and let the cat out of the bag, you cannot get it back,” says Andrew Hoell, a NOAA research meteorologist, where he is co-leader of the drought task force. “It can be used in ways you never imagined.”
He just finished his speech at the “Explaining Press Conference on Extremism Events,” which was rather dry in terms of language. Dr. Hoell then emphasized what he wouldn’t say: “I don’t use the word ‘super-drought'”. discussion titled, “Drought, super drought or a permanent change? A changing pattern for drought in the western United States.”
“You won’t hear me use that term,” Dr. Hoell said again. “It’s not relevant. I could describe it in simpler language.”
As if? “The drought is prolonged,” he said.
Ultimately, the language dilemma reflects a larger challenge. On the one hand, it’s hard to underestimate the profound risk that global warming poses to Earth’s inhabitants over the next century and beyond, scientists say. But the drumming of language may not be suitable for the everyday nature of many weather events.
The blame is often put on a passive voice: Weather scientists have created attention-grabbing terms that are fed into a ratings-based media vortex. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that the term engineering has been widely used without context by traditional media and on social media “where a Some people may use the term half-jokingly and others get really confused.”
He added, “The headlines literally sound like the end of the world.”
Let’s consider “ARkStorm.” This term appeared in 2010 in a project led by the U.S. Geological Survey, which explored “the initial superstorm scenario predicted to be a once-in-1,000-year event.” The term is a combination of “atmospheric river,” “k” (representing 1,000), and “storm,” with overall biblical resonance.
“The acronym exists, as one might expect, as a gentle allusion to the Noachian flood, although the actual scenario is not far from the biblical description,” says Dr. Swain, one of the researchers involved in a 2018 report called ARkStorm 2.0.
The ARkStorm study suggests the weather can cause flooding thousands of miles, cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, evacuate more than a million people, and occur more often every 1,000 years, particularly on the West Coast. (The original forecast, according to Genesis, called for “the floodwaters of the earth to destroy all life under the sky, every living thing that breathed life in it. Everything on earth would perish.” )
Epic, epochal, or apocalyptic, no ARkStorm took place in mid-January, despite an email sent to Dr. Swain from a media outlet asking if ARkStorm “has hit California tonight.” or not”.
He quickly called back to prevent misinformation from spreading, Dr. Swain said. He surmised that the paper had read about the report or its headline, but had not read the report itself. “No,” he told the outlet, “this is not literally the end of the world.”
