DENVER — Last week, days after a bomb cyclone (along with a series of atmospheric rivers, some of the Pineapple Express variety) made a devastating impact in California, the forces responsible flooded a downtown conference center , not for the torrential rain and wind but for the forecast.
Dozens of the world’s most authoritative meteorologists and meteorological scientists came together to share the latest research at the 103rd meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The subject line of an email to participants on the first day projected optimism: “Daily Forecast: A Flood of Scientific Knowledge.”
But there were worrisome undertones. Scientists agree on the increasing frequency of extreme weather events (the Buffalo blizzard, the Montecito, California floods, the prolonged drought in East Africa) and their worrisome impacts. At the Denver meeting, however, there was another growing concern: how people talk about the weather.
The widespread use of colorful terms such as “bomb cyclone” and “atmospheric river”, along with the proliferating categories, colors and storm names 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 real risk. The new vocabulary, devised in many cases by the meteorological scientific community, threatens to spiral out of control.
“Language evolved to get people’s attention,” he said. cindy Bruyere, director of the Center of Capacity for Extreme Climates and Weather of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. She sat with two fellow scientists in a coffee shop between sessions and grew more animated as she discussed what she called “buzzwords” that are meaningless.
“I don’t have images in my head when I hear the term ‘bomb cyclone.’” He said: “We need significantly clearer language, not hype.”
Others find that the words, while evocative, are sometimes misused. “The worst is the ‘polar vortex,’” he said. andrea lopez lang, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, while standing in a hallway between meteorological science sessions. Dr. Lopez Lang is an expert on polar vortices, 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,” he said.
In an effort to contain runaway verbiage, meteorological scientists have begun studying the impact of extreme weather language. How do people react to the way the weather is communicated? Do they take the proper precautions? Or do they turn it off?
It’s “a hot topic,” he said. Gina Eosco, social scientist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Weather Program Office. “Literally, communication is our number one concern.” In 2021, Dr. Eosco authored an article with the vague title, “Can a consistent message be achieved?: Defining ‘message consistency’ for researchers and practitioners in meteorological companies”.
At the moment, the answer to the newspaper’s question is: cloudy. To underscore the problem, Dr. Eosco, sitting on the floor in a conference room, pulled the phone out of her and showcased a collection of messages from various television stations and websites that used competing graphics, colors and language to characterize Tropical Storm Henri, in 2021. The presentations weren’t all that different from each other, Dr. Eosco noted, but they hinted at the diversity in approaches to qualifying intense weather.
“I’m trying to see how people are styling it this year,” he said. “They’re giving it a face lift, essentially.”
To fully understand the impact of how people talk about the weather, Dr. Eosco said, more information is needed. His NOAA division has asked researchers to quantify the effectiveness of weather messaging strategies, including “visual, verbal, name, category messaging.”
The larger goal, he said, was to make sure the official cascade of weather terminology promoted understanding and proper public response, not confusion.
“I got a text from a family member this weekend saying, ‘Is an atmospheric river a real thing?’” he said. williams Castle, a social scientist sitting on the floor next to Dr. Eosco; the two co-authored the 2021 paper on consistent weather messages. “She thought it was a made up word for heavy rain.” She added: “I gave him a lot of information about atmospheric rivers.” Dr. Eosco noted that the researchers were exploring the possibility of grouping atmospheric rivers into categories, much like hurricanes were classified numerically based on their severity.
Some of the vivid terminology begins with scientists: “bomb cyclone,” for example. “The reason we call it a bomb is because it’s the explosive buildup of a surface cyclone, in other words, the winds that people are living near the ground are experiencing,” he said. John Gyakuma McGill University meteorologist who 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 the pressure atmospheric.
In the early days of the terms, the weather pattern “was primarily an oceanic phenomenon,” Dr. Gyakum said, and it still is to a large extent. Perhaps more people are affected these days because the coasts are more densely populated. “Why do we hear more about bomb cyclones than 40 years ago?” he said. “People are paying more attention to extreme weather than in the old days.” He added: “Talking about bomb cyclones is not necessarily an indication of a higher frequency.”
According to Google Trends, the phrase “bomb cyclone” was barely uttered until 2017 but since then it has become a din, along with “weather bomb” Y “weather cyclone bomb.”
Some meteorologists said they had become cautious about what they said, to avoid sensationalism. “Once you use a term and let the cat out of the bag, you can’t put it back in,” he said. andres hoell, a NOAA research meteorologist, where he is co-chair of the Drought Working Group. “It can be used in ways you never imagined.”
I had just finished speaking at the “Explanation of Extreme Events Press Conference” which was pretty dry linguistically. Later, Dr. Hoell was more emphatic about what he won’t say: “I don’t use ‘megadrought’.” However, later in the conference he was scheduled to participate in an assembly discussion titled, “Drought, mega-drought or a permanent change? A changing paradigm for drought in the western United States.
“You won’t hear me use that term,” Dr. Hoell said again. “It is not relevant. I can characterize it in simpler language.”
Such as? “Prolonged drought,” she said.
In the end, the linguistic dilemma reflects a greater challenge. On the one hand, say the scientists, it is hard to underestimate the profound risk that global warming poses to Earth’s inhabitants in the next century and beyond. But the drumbeat of language may not be appropriate for the everyday nature of many weather events.
Usually, the blame is placed on the passive voice: meteorological scientists created attention-grabbing terms, which were drawn into the ratings-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 mainstream media and on social media “where some people may jokingly use a middle ground and others may really freak it out.” .
He added: “The headlines literally sound like the end of the world.”
Consider the “ARkStorm”. The term arose in 2010 in a project spearheaded by the United States Geological Survey, which explored 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, unsurprisingly, as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Noah’s flood, although the setting, frankly, is not that far from the biblical description,” he said. Dr Swain, who was among the researchers involved in a 2018 report called ARkStorm 2.0.
ARkStorm research proposes weather that could flood thousands of miles, cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage, cause more than a million people to evacuate, and occur more frequently than every 1,000 years, particularly in the West Coast. (The Original Forecast, according to Genesis, called for “floods upon the earth to destroy all life under heaven, every creature that has the breath of life in it. Everything on earth will perish.”)
As epic, epochal, or apocalyptic as it was, there was no ARkStorm going as of mid-January, despite an email to Dr. Swain from a news outlet asking if ARkStorm is “going to California tonight.”
He quickly called back, to prevent misinformation from spreading, Dr. Swain said. He assumed that the outlet had read about the report or read its headline, but he had not read the report itself. “No,” he said, telling the outlet, “this is not literally the end of the world.”
