Weather Channel To Start Naming Winter Storms

Snowfall is one of the "criteria" that TWC will be judging.

Big news in the weather world this week...No I'm not talking about tropical system Nadine finally ending her record long journey in the Atlantic (21 days to be exact tying 2nd for longest all time). Nope this story comes from closer to home, here in the U.S. As a matter of fact it's out of Atlanta at a place called The Weather Channel. Maybe you've heard of it. Well the big news is that they have decided to start naming winter storms this winter, kind of like the way hurricanes are named.  Up to this point, the only storms that were named were tropical systems and it was done by government weather (National Hurricane Center). This makes sense to just have a weather service that is not out to make a profit, to do the naming and to issue warnings and such.  Well weather channel will now be naming winter storms and of course it'll stick because they are one of the most successful weather companies out there. The problem is this kind of leaves AccuWeather, WeatherBug, and other weather companies feeling a little left out of the winter fun. They will either have to create there own winter storm names, which will cause chaos having to remember a bunch of names for one storm, or they will have to play along with their rivals (TWC) naming game. Looks like TWC beat everybody else to the ratings booster. 

It'll be interesting to see how the whole naming thing goes this winter. I'm thinking it'll be quite successful for them. It'll definitely get them some more ratings and they will be the talk of twitter when Winter Storm "Q" comes barreling into Queens New York. Yeah, "Q" is one of the proposed storm names. However, there is a good chance we won't make it that far in the name list.  Other weather companies may ignore the names and I can understand why. They would just be giving their rival company time on there page. I feel like TWC has started a potential storm amongst the weather companies. We'll call this one...Jealousy? I'm neutral on the position right now on whether I like it or not. Personally, I think naming of any storm system should be left to government weather services and left out of the private sector. Things just get messy when that isn't followed.

However, The Weather Channel did make some good points regarding why they decided to name the storms.  They cited the fact that naming storms will raise awareness, make it easier to track and talk about, and easier to reference in the future. Alright, makes sense to me. They also said they won't name storms until three days before it impacts an area and that the storm criteria will be based off of ice, wind, snowfall, and temperature.

The list of names is interesting in my opinion. Most of them are Greek related but there are a few odd ball ones in there such as "Q".  There were many names that didn't quite make the list.  You should check those out HERE.  The name that will start all of this madness will be Athena.

For more on this, check out their article HERE.
Full list of names HERE.