DENVER — Last week, days after a bomb cyclone (along with a series of atmospheric rivers, some of the Pineapple Express variety) devastated California, a downtown conference center here was overrun by the forces responsible — not because of the pounding rain and wind but for the forecast.
Dozens of the world’s most authoritative meteorologists and weather scientists gathered to share the latest research at the 103rd meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The subject line of an email sent to participants on the first day exuded optimism: “Daily Forecast: A deluge of scientific knowledge.”
But there were troubling undercurrents. Scientists agree on the increasing frequency of extreme weather events – the blizzard in Buffalo, flooding in Montecito, California, prolonged drought in East Africa – and their worrying consequences. At the Denver meeting, however, there was another growing concern: how people talk about the weather.
The widespread use of colorful terms like “bomb cyclone” and “atmospheric river,” along with the proliferating categories, colors, and names of storms and weather patterns, has struck meteorologists as a mixed blessing: good for public safety and climate change awareness, but potentially so amplified that it leaves the public numb or unsure of the actual risk. The new vocabulary, devised in many cases by the weather science community, is in danger of getting out of hand.
“The language evolved to grab people’s attention,” said Cindy Bruyere, director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Capacity Center for Climate and Weather Extremes. Between sessions, she sat in a coffee bar with two fellow scientists and became increasingly animated as she discussed what she called “buzz words” that made no sense.
“I have no images in my head when I hear the term ‘bomb cyclone’.” She said, “We need significantly clearer language, not hype words.”
Others feel that the words, while evocative, are sometimes misused. “The worst is ‘polar vortex,'” said Andrea Lopez Lang, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, as she stood in a hallway between weather science sessions. Dr. Lopez Lang is an expert on polar eddies, which are technically stratospheric phenomena that occur at least six miles above sea level. “But in the last decade, people have started to describe it as cold air at ground level,” she said.
In an effort to contain the runaway verbiage, weather scientists have begun studying the impact of extreme weather language. How do people react to the way the weather is communicated? Are they taking the proper precautions? Or do they tune it?
It’s “a hot topic,” said Gina Eosco, a social scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Program Office. “Literally, communication is our main concern.” In 2021 Dr. Eosco authored a paper with the not-too-succinct title: “Is Message Consistent Achievable?: Defining ‘Message Consistency’ for Weather Enterprise Researchers and Practitioners.”
For now, the answer to the newspaper’s question is: cloudy. To underline the problem, Dr. Eosco — sitting on the floor in a conference room — pulled out her phone and showed a collection of messages from various television stations and websites that used competing images, colors and language to characterize Tropical Storm Henri in 2021. The presentations were not very different from each other, Dr. Eosco, but they pointed out the diversity in approaches to branding intense weather.
“I’m trying to see how people design it this year,” she said. “They’re essentially giving it a facelift.”
To fully understand the impact of how people talk about the weather, Dr. Eosco, more information is needed. Her division of NOAA has called on researchers to quantify the effectiveness of weather reporting strategies, including “visual, verbal messages, naming, categories.”
The broader goal, she said, was to ensure that the official cascade of weather terminology promoted understanding and appropriate public response, not confusion.
“I got a text from a family member this weekend that said, ‘Does an atmospheric river really exist?'” said Castle Williams, a social scientist who sat on the floor next to Dr. Eosco; the two were joint authors of the 2021 paper on consistent weather reporting. “She thought it was a made-up word for intensely rainy.” He added, “I gave her a lot of information about atmospheric rivers.” Dr. Eosco noted that researchers were exploring whether atmospheric rivers should be categorized, just as hurricanes were ranked numerically by severity.
Some of the lively terminology starts with the scientists, for example ‘bomb cyclone’. “The reason we called it a bomb is because it’s the explosive intensification of a surface cyclone, in other words, the winds you experience near the ground where people live,” said John Gyakum, a meteorologist at McGill. University that helped coin the term in the 1980s. The less concise definition is a “24-hour period in which the central pressure drops by at least 24 millibars,” which is a measure of atmospheric pressure.
In the early days of the term, the weather pattern was “primarily an ocean phenomenon,” said Dr. Gyakum, and that’s mostly it. Perhaps more people are affected these days because the coasts are more densely populated. “Why are we hearing more about bomb cyclones than we did 40 years ago?” he said. “People are paying more attention to extreme weather than they used to be.” He added: “Talking about bomb cyclones is not necessarily indicative of increased frequency.”
According to Google Trends, the phrase “bomb cyclone” was barely spoken until 2017, but has since risen to prominence, along with “weather bomb” and “weather cyclone bomb.”
Some meteorologists said they have become careful about what they say to avoid sensationalism. “Once you use a term and get the cat out of the bag, you can’t get it back in,” said Andrew Hoell, a research meteorologist at NOAA, where he co-leads the drought task force. “It can be used in ways you never imagined.”
He had just finished speaking at the Explaining Extreme Events Press Conference, which was linguistically quite dry. Afterwards, Dr. Hoell was more emphatic about what he won’t say: “I don’t use ‘mega-drought’.” Nevertheless, later during the conference, he would take part in a town hall discussion titled “Drought, Mega Drought.” , or a permanent change? A Shifting Paradigm for Drought in the Western United States.”
“You don’t hear me use that term,” Dr. Hoell said again. “It’s irrelevant. I can characterize it in clearer language.”
Such as? “Prolonged drought,” he said.
Ultimately, the language dilemma reflects a greater challenge. On the one hand, scientists say, it’s hard to overestimate the great risk global warming poses to Earth’s inhabitants in the next century and beyond. But the rhythm of the language may not be suitable for the day-to-day nature of many weather conditions.
The blame is usually cast in the passive form: weather scientists coined catchy terms, which were sucked into the rating-driven media vortex. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the technical terminology was widely used without context by traditional news media and on social media “where some people use a term half in jest and others get really freaked out . .”
He added, “Cup headlines literally sound like the end of the world.”
Consider the ‘ARkStorm’. The term originated in 2010 in a project led by the United States Geological Survey, which investigated a “megastorm scenario originally projected as a 1 in 1,000 year event.” The term is a verbal mass combining “atmospheric river,” “k” (representing 1000), and “storm” with a general biblical resonance.
“The acronym exists, as you might expect, as an ironic reference to the Noah’s Flood, though frankly the scenario doesn’t stray that far from the Biblical representation,” said Dr. Swain, one of the researchers involved. in a 2018 report called ArkStorm 2.0.
The ArkStorm study again suggests that flooding could flood thousands of miles, cause hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, cause the evacuation of more than a million people, and could happen more often than every 1,000 years, especially on the West Coast. (The original prophecy, according to Genesis, called for “floods on earth to destroy all life under heaven, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.”)
No matter how epic, groundbreaking, or apocalyptic, no ArkStorm was on its way by mid-January, despite the email to Dr. Swain from a media outlet asking if the ArkStorm “will hit California tonight”.
He called back quickly to prevent misinformation from spreading, Dr Swain said. He suspected that the outlet had read about the report or read its headline, but had not read the report itself. “No,” he told the outlet, “this isn’t literally the end of the world.”
