The biggest storm of the past 24 hours, at least for me, was inside the Collegian office. At about 8 p.m. Monday, all hell broke loose in our office. The reason: Sandy was no longer a hurricane. This was great news in the sense that people on the East Coast could breathe a little easier. For the Collegian, and likely for any other newspaper reporting on Sandy, it meant we had to go back and make changes.
Every story about Sandy had “hurricane” in it. This was no longer factual. The problem was we did not know what to call it. Typically, if a hurricane downgrades, it becomes what’s known as a tropical storm, which according to the Associated Press stylebook is “a warm-core tropical cyclone in which the maximum sustained surface winds range from 39 to 73 mph inclusive.” This wasn’t the case for Sandy. Instead, everyone started using the term “superstorm.”
I’ve been watching weather since childhood. I spent two years studying meteorology at Penn State. I cannot tell you what a superstorm is. I have never heard of it. It wasn’t used during Hurricane Agnes, Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Katrina or any other major hurricane I’ve heard of or seen in my lifetime.
Yet, the Associated Press, CNN, The Weather Channel and others now reported on “Superstorm Sandy.”
Back in the Collegian office, copy desk and others were trying to make heads or tails of what a superstorm was and if it was the correct technical term for journalism. Some said yes, others said no. Tempers rose as we attempted to define a superstorm – a term we never heard – with little to no meteorological knowledge we possessed.
Our AP stylebooks had no passage on “superstorms.” We had to know what was right. It was the difference between us being accurate and the Collegian running a correction spanning several stories in Wednesday’s issue. Eventually, the Collegian settled on superstorm and called it a night. I, on the other hand, am having a hard time shaking away the superstorm debate.
Through the morning, I spent time searching “superstorm” on the top meteorological sources in the country, which includes the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the National Hurricane Hurricane Center. What I found was none of them could provide me with a concrete definition of a “superstorm,” but all of them suggested we’ve had at least two major superstorms in the past 12 years.
One was “Superstorm 1991,” which is more infamously recognized as “The Perfect Storm.” The latter was popularized in a movie of the same name starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. The Perfect Storm consisted of a nor’easter (a storm moving along the East Coast with winds coming from the northeast) and Hurricane Grace, coincidentally also about the time of Halloween. The end result was an estimated $208,200,000 in damage, with half of that in Massachusetts alone, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
Less than two years later in March, “Superstorm 1993,” aka “The Great Blizzard” and “The Storm of the Century” struck. This storm caused storm surges and dumped as much as 60 inches of snow in the Appalachian region, according to NOAA. Superstorm ’93 had a larger toll on the United States than its predecessor, causing 79 deaths, more than 600 injuries and two billion dollars in damage, according to NOAA.
So will Sandy go down in history with these other two? It is comfortable to say yes. As of 1:45 p.m. Tuesday, the death toll ranges between 30 to 40 casualties. The cost of damage from Sandy is unknown, but many are estimating it to exceed the cost of Superstorm ’93. I’m not going to argue if Sandy was a “superstorm” or not in comparison to the storms in 1991 and 1993. I will argue, however, that labeling Sandy a “superstorm” prematurely led only to confusion.
Even though NOAA, NWS and NHC recognize the term “superstorm,” it does not appear to be a technical meteorological term for a specific weather phenomenon. The term “superstorm,” more or less, is a name either created or highly endorsed by the media. Cyclones are characterized as tropical depressions, tropical storms or hurricanes. Each is defined by factors like wind and barometric pressure.
In addition, cyclones are labeled with a predetermined list of names each hurricane season. This is done for a reason – so people know what to call a cyclone. Meteorologists made it easier for us to label storms, yet the media makes it complex again by coining cutesy names to these storms.
I won't completely blame the media since I'm not entirely sure where the term "superstorm" originated. The fact the media went on to promote the term and provide little explanation as to what constitutes a "superstorm" is what upsets me. Another phrase I heard for Sandy was "post-tropical cyclone." While this phrase is still complex, it sounds much more legitimate than "superstorm," reminding me of all the "super" objects in a "Fairly Odd Parents" episode.
As the remnants of Sandy crawl across the northeast and Midwest U.S. into Canada, the storm has downgraded. I guess it’s no longer “super.” I’m not sure if it ever was “super.” Was Sandy a bad storm? Absolutely. But does any storm deserve to be labeled “super”? In some heavily affected areas like New Jersey, New York and Maryland, it seems appropriate. The rest of the country not affected by Sandy will likely see it as “another storm.”
As for me, I’ll keep it simple and refer to Sandy as “hurricane” or “cyclone.” Hurricane may not be accurate, but “superstorm,” to my knowledge, isn’t as well. I’ll go with whatever confuses me and the rest of the population the least. Throwing "super" in front of a storm name does not make it more severe. The damage, death tolls and injuries are what make cyclones the most super weather on the planet.
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