Hansey
5864
Do they think that? I mean, I think we have nice beaches, but if your definition of a “nice beach” is a soft, sandy beach, then yeah, you’re gonna be disappointed. ;)
abrandt
5865
I think generally when people refer to beaches that’s what they are after. Although I did spend a sunny afternoon in the sand and water during my time in Maine, it was just on a river.
I keep seeing that show up in the models and every meteorologist I’ve seen cover the storm doesn’t even really acknowledge those numbers and instead references 8-12 inches in SE Michigan with maybe some places going above. That being said, happy this one will stay mostly south of us here on the west side.
If Winter Storm Landon doesn’t deliver on the potential and high expectations of heavy snow, will folks in its path start calling it “Landycakes” instead?
Thrag
5869
Will it be snow lovers or haters chanting “Let’s go Landon”?
I appreciate that this one is NOT scheduled to beat on the MA area. We’re still good with the snow we already have.
stusser
5872
They’re actually quite delicious if you remember to remove the stank glands first. Otherwise, not so much.
The Friday storm they are predicting for where I am shows 15-20" maybe. It isn’t the snow so much that I worry about, as it is power. We have lots of trees here, and even though storms and selective pruning have trimmed away the most egregious threats, every serious wind or winter storm seems to bring outages. That’s not a good thing for us, as our water comes from a well, with no manual pump backup (it’s way out in the back anyhow). So, power goes out, no water, and not toilet flushing, to go with the obvious no heat. The gas stove burners can work with manual lighting but that’s about it.
The Weather Channel is still trying to get the idea of naming winter storms to catch on? How cute.
Seems to be gaining in adoption and use.
A long long time ago when I was first starting to “get good” at the world of bioinformatics, I worked on building LIMS (laboratory information management systems.) We tracked huge amounts of sequencing of human genomes, as well as running single nucleotide polymorphism tests (a few years later, I was writing algorithms to interpret the raw fluorescence data from those tests and turn it into more interesting variation data in the human genome.)
The unit of work for those experiments was a 96 well plate, where you could put samples from 96 different samples (people, etc) into the same batch for testing (indeed, covid PCR testing can be done in this format now!)
One of the things we discovered in writing these tracking systems was that saying “There’s an error in plate 00239483-Z” wasn’t particularly useful. People can’t remember that. What did work was creating all possible words that had 5 letters, and naming batches by those. When you say “APPLE looked good, HUZZY was fine, but FOOTS looked like there was a big problem!” people were more easily able to latch on and remember FOOTS if you then mentioned that problem weeks later. Each plate had an auto-generated label with a barcode, but also had this human readable thing that people could easily work with in their head.
Naming things really helps people remember and know what you’re talking about. Humans are weird that way.
Using Wordle before Wordle was cool. Impressive!
I haven’t seen the Big Two east coast media outlets use the names for winter storms in their print or online editions, but I have seen their weather reporters/meteorologists use them in social media pretty freely.
A hurricane is a discrete thing with boundaries, and anyone in its path is potentially subject to a fairly predictable set of bad outcomes. Only a few actually make landfall, and fewer still of those make landfall in the US, and very very few make landfall in any one particular spot. People in and around Palm Beach will, for many years, continue to have specific memories of Wilma (2005) and Irma (2017), just to pluck one non-Katrina-level example.
Winter storms are large and amorphous. They affect huge swaths of the country and have dramatically different impacts in different regions. How many people in New England remember the names given to even the worst winter storms of 2017?
The reason I heard on NPR is that if they started giving them names, then it will make it easier politically to get disaster relief and funding for new projects, etc. if the phenomena is a named entity.
