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Once again, it looks like we're sitting this one out:
It's flurrying as I write, but nothing near the totals along the coast that have turned NYC into a PA-NIC and put Boston on a full French Toast Alert. Yet we have some inconsistency here: The Weather Channel, which started naming winter storms in advance several years ago, has assigned the 15th name on the list, Orlena, to this mess, while at least the FTA designation of its Nor'easter component is Fred (all nor'easters are named Fred, right?).
I've been wondering why the National Weather Service has such a bug up its atmosphere about not using the winter storm names. If they don't like TWC's choices they should make up their own. They do a perfectly good job of coming up with them for tropical storms and hurricanes.
It just seems a good way to communicate and memorialize. I was trying to explain the 1991 Rochester Ice Storm on the trail the other day, and being able to call it "Murray," or "Debby," or whatever, would have been a lot more distinctive and less polysyllabic. The meteorogical mucky-mucks "retire" the names of particularly devastating hurricanes, and their names- think Katrina, Hugo and Agnes- still resonate with their victims years or even decades later. I'm old enough to remember the days when hurricanes were only given female names; both of my sisters have the honor of having had Donna and Sandy taken off the board for their destructiveness. (Raymond remains in play, however;)
I've read a lot of reasons, but most of them could be dealt with through judicious development of the name list and only assigning them when they're of a certain strength and/or geographic width. "Blizzard of '77" still has a deadly meaning to those who lived through that event, even though it was limited pretty much to just the immediate Buffalo area. It's just as deserving of a proper name as a hurricane gets.
John Oliver has a good piece about the commercialization of weather forecasting in general which only briefly touches on this aspect of stormchasing-
-but having the government(s) come up with its own nomenclature would make the private business names less marketable- and would probably avoid issues that sometimes arise with the sillier ones-
Just wait for it to run into a Pole-ar vortex, ifyaknowwhaImean....
----
Perhaps weather elsewhere is delaying arrival of the cooker I mentioned the other day. It's supposedly in the area code, but it hasn't gotten here yet. Pepper's usually pretty quiet inside the house, except if she sees a passing dog, or squirrel, or the occasional molecule on the back yard fence. This morning, though, she practically ran over the kitten reacting to something. Eleanor saw fresh footprints in the snow and thought it might be the Prime delivery we were expecting. But no- apparently it was a utility worker checking something in our yard.
Either that or it's the new service from Bezos- Amazon Treasure, where you buy something online and within two days, they ship it for free, deliver it to your house and bury it in your backyard. You can rent the map for $3.99, have two days to start digging and 48 hours to finish.
----
Rochester's on the edge of Orlena's wrath, but they've got other issues. On the heels of a local Catholic school graduate being charged with threats on Pence and Pelosi at the site of the Insurrection, it then came out over the weekend that the biggest local university hospital was caught encouraging "major donors" to jump the queue for COVID vaccines:
URMC spokesperson Chip Partner told WXXI News that Anderson’s email was made in error.
Translation: "Oh shit, we got caught!"
But that all pales in the light of what else was revealed. A city, still reeling from a covered-up death at city police hands of a mental health patient, is now facing the revelation that another squad of police officers, still unaccompanied by mental health professionals, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a nine-year old girl because she was "acting like a child." There's disturbing bodycam footage in that link, and it just makes you shake your head about how far we still have to go. At least some of the officers were suspended, of course with pay; the police union honk has honked all the things you would expect them to; and there will be plenty of handwringing that will likely not stop something similar from occurring in another six months.
Happy Black History Month. Where we hide the Black face from the video as we try to hide our shame.
It's flurrying as I write, but nothing near the totals along the coast that have turned NYC into a PA-NIC and put Boston on a full French Toast Alert. Yet we have some inconsistency here: The Weather Channel, which started naming winter storms in advance several years ago, has assigned the 15th name on the list, Orlena, to this mess, while at least the FTA designation of its Nor'easter component is Fred (all nor'easters are named Fred, right?).
I've been wondering why the National Weather Service has such a bug up its atmosphere about not using the winter storm names. If they don't like TWC's choices they should make up their own. They do a perfectly good job of coming up with them for tropical storms and hurricanes.
It just seems a good way to communicate and memorialize. I was trying to explain the 1991 Rochester Ice Storm on the trail the other day, and being able to call it "Murray," or "Debby," or whatever, would have been a lot more distinctive and less polysyllabic. The meteorogical mucky-mucks "retire" the names of particularly devastating hurricanes, and their names- think Katrina, Hugo and Agnes- still resonate with their victims years or even decades later. I'm old enough to remember the days when hurricanes were only given female names; both of my sisters have the honor of having had Donna and Sandy taken off the board for their destructiveness. (Raymond remains in play, however;)
I've read a lot of reasons, but most of them could be dealt with through judicious development of the name list and only assigning them when they're of a certain strength and/or geographic width. "Blizzard of '77" still has a deadly meaning to those who lived through that event, even though it was limited pretty much to just the immediate Buffalo area. It's just as deserving of a proper name as a hurricane gets.
John Oliver has a good piece about the commercialization of weather forecasting in general which only briefly touches on this aspect of stormchasing-
-but having the government(s) come up with its own nomenclature would make the private business names less marketable- and would probably avoid issues that sometimes arise with the sillier ones-
Just wait for it to run into a Pole-ar vortex, ifyaknowwhaImean....
----
Perhaps weather elsewhere is delaying arrival of the cooker I mentioned the other day. It's supposedly in the area code, but it hasn't gotten here yet. Pepper's usually pretty quiet inside the house, except if she sees a passing dog, or squirrel, or the occasional molecule on the back yard fence. This morning, though, she practically ran over the kitten reacting to something. Eleanor saw fresh footprints in the snow and thought it might be the Prime delivery we were expecting. But no- apparently it was a utility worker checking something in our yard.
Either that or it's the new service from Bezos- Amazon Treasure, where you buy something online and within two days, they ship it for free, deliver it to your house and bury it in your backyard. You can rent the map for $3.99, have two days to start digging and 48 hours to finish.
----
Rochester's on the edge of Orlena's wrath, but they've got other issues. On the heels of a local Catholic school graduate being charged with threats on Pence and Pelosi at the site of the Insurrection, it then came out over the weekend that the biggest local university hospital was caught encouraging "major donors" to jump the queue for COVID vaccines:
URMC spokesperson Chip Partner told WXXI News that Anderson’s email was made in error.
Translation: "Oh shit, we got caught!"
But that all pales in the light of what else was revealed. A city, still reeling from a covered-up death at city police hands of a mental health patient, is now facing the revelation that another squad of police officers, still unaccompanied by mental health professionals, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a nine-year old girl because she was "acting like a child." There's disturbing bodycam footage in that link, and it just makes you shake your head about how far we still have to go. At least some of the officers were suspended, of course with pay; the police union honk has honked all the things you would expect them to; and there will be plenty of handwringing that will likely not stop something similar from occurring in another six months.
Happy Black History Month. Where we hide the Black face from the video as we try to hide our shame.