User:Jason Rees/TWC Naming

Background
The practice of using names to identify weather systems goes back several centuries, with systems named after places, saints or things they hit before the formal start of naming in each basin. Examples include the 1526 San Francisco hurricane, the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane and the 1938 New England hurricane. Credit for the first usage of personal names for weather is generally given to the Queensland Government Meteorologist Clement Wragge, who named named tropical cyclones and anticyclones between 1887–1907. This system of naming weather systems subsequently fell into disuse for several years after Wragge retired, until it was revived in the latter part of the Second World War.

Within the United States systems that impact major metropolitan areas tend to be widely remembered by the name they were given in the media, however, as social media started to become widespread, people started to unofficially give winter storms names which caught on such as snowpocalypse, snowmageddon, as well as #snOMG.

TWC
During Halloween 2011, a nor'easter impacted the northeastern United States and was nicknamed "Snowtober" on social media, which prompted The Weather Channel (TWC) to put the nickname on air where it took off. As a result, the commercial weather service started to investigate naming winter storms and realised that Twitter needed a hashtag for every system so that information could be filtered. During October 2012, TWC announced that they would start proactively naming noteworthy winter storms using names from a predetermined list of 26 Roman and Greek names. TWC argued that the naming scheme would raise awareness, make communications and information sharing easier, which in turn would make it easier for people to understand forecasts, lead to better planning, preparedness and result in less impact overall. The initial reaction to TWC's naming scheme was mixed as most people did not have a problem with it, while others were not happy that TWC had not consulted the rest of the meteorological community on the initiative and called it self-serving and not in the interest of effective weather communication. After considering TWC's press release and various other factors, the founder and president of the commercial weather service Accuweather, Dr. Joel N. Myers, suggested that TWC had "confused media spin with science and public safety." He also stated that Accuweather had explored the issue for 20 years and had concluded that it "was not good science" and would "mislead the public" and noted that "winter storms were very different from hurricanes". At the time the NWS made no comment about the naming system and noted that they did not name winter storms.

After TWC named its first system in November 2012, the NWS Eastern Region headquarters reminded its forecast offices that it didn't name Winter Storms, however, the NWS WFO Buffalo unofficially named six systems after the fact during the winter of 2012-13. During the season, TWC did not use any quantitative method to name the systems and decided to turn to a list of names created by the Latin Club at the Bozeman High School in Montana, after it exhausted the list of names that it had preselected. After the season had ended, TWC reviewed the systems it had assigned a name to and felt that 90% of the systems deserved to be named, based on the impacts they had on a regional/national basis. They also determined that the project had been a success after over a billion impressions were recorded on Twitter and numerous schools, agencies and media outlets had started to use the naming scheme. As a result, they decided to use the named storms of 2012-13 as a benchmark and developed a quantitative method for deciding when to name future storms, which they entitled the Integrated Meteorological Population and Area Calculation Tool (IMPACT). This tool allowed TWC to calculate the population and area that is forecast to be impacted by a winter storm, based on thresholds set by the NWS for winter weather warnings and advisories. As a result, they decided that they would name a storm during the 2013-14 season if it was forecast to impact over 10 million people or 1000000 km2, however, it was noted that the storm naming committee could override the guidance in certain circumstances. Over the next few years, TWC continued to develop the science behind their naming scheme and collaborated with the Latin class at Bozeman High School to release a new set of 26 names each year.

Names
Initially, there was a fear that the names selected by TWC would be confused with hurricane names, before a suggestion was made and adopted to use Greek or Roman names as a base. The Latin Club at the Bozeman High School in Montana subsequently took on an extra-curricular project to come up with more names and their lists were used for a few years before TWC started to use the most popular baby names and other common names.

AMS Committee
During 2017 an ad-hoc subcommittee of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on the Effective Communication of Water and Climate Information investigated the naming of winter storms, in order to see if the United States weather enterprise and National Weather Service should adopt a winter storm naming process. The Committee requested and received presentations on The Weather Channel's naming scheme, Social Science and Named Winter Storms, Differing perceptions of Hurricanes and Nor’easters and two on Met Éireann and the United Kingdom's Met Office's naming scheme. The committee also consulted with the NWS who noted that collaboration would be needed with Canada and Mexico, while the agency that named the systems would need to be neutral. The NWS also noted that its participation in any research did not imply an endorsement of the naming scheme or commitment to an operational change and that it did not have any plans to invest any money in this area. The committee subsequently found that there was no strong evidence that naming winter storms enhanced safety and that the major intent behind naming winter storms was to help communications with the general public and decision-makers. Members of the committee subsequently commented that they felt better informed after these presentations, but were not able to come to a consensus on if the United States weather enterprise should adopt a naming process for Winter Storms. In particular, members felt like they needed more information before they could make an informed opinion and suggested that further research was needed around the naming criteria, why and how the TWC names are used and into any potential harm of naming weather systems.