Sandy's Number

Hundreds of people lost their lives this past week in Hurricane Sandy, and many of those victims were warned in advance—far in advance—to evacuate. Community leaders and elected officials probably did all they could short of forcibly removing people form their homes, and no one did more for the general good than the meteorologists who, as much as seven days in advance, predicted an unprecedented storm path, and at least three days in advance warned of an event that would live on in the annals of U.S. disasters. The professional meteorologists—those behind the scenes at the Weather Channel and other providers—saved thousands of lives.

But if they didn't do enough, it's because we have become anesthetized to weather—we've been misled too often. For instance, a two-to four-inch snowfall is predicted and it becomes the lead story on the evening news. Once that happens, the stations try to outdo each other, promising to be on the air earlier and earlier the following morning so that we'll all be okay. You know what? We're going to be okay anyway, especially those of us with a push broom to sweep the snowfall off our driveways. I understand ratings and the need to sell advertising, but there's a fine line between fear-mongering and over-hyping, and I'm afraid many of Sandy's victims didn't see it, or forgot it was there.

Now we worry about naming storms winter (I never thought that made any sense), but why doesn't the National Weather Service number them in terms of severity, as they do with hurricanes and tornados after the fact. The NWS performs functions like these all the time—assigning CAPE readings to measure convection during thunderstorm season and crunching the numbers to indicate whether a snowstorm qualifies as a blizzard. Wouldn't it be easy to assign severity to all storms on the basis of precipitable water, highest expected wind speeds, temperature extremes, even fog or icing potential? A moderate rainstorm, maybe less than half an inch, with little wind and mild temperatures might earn a 2 or less; a heavier snowstorm with cold temperatures and strong winds, a 5 or 6; a storm like Sandy, a 10. These professional knew it was 10 last Friday—maybe being able to bandy about that number would make evacuation more palatable.

Local TV stations could choose to use the system or not, but we'd all know it was there, and the NOAA web site would lay it out by zones, i.e., a storm might be a 4 for Litchfield county but a 1 at the shore. And yes, people would complain about exaggerations still, but the numbers would be quantifiable and based on real observations, not the hysteria of some on-air personality trying to one-up his counterparts from across town.

I know there are those who will claim we have too many numbers already, and maybe we do. But if there's a chance that lives could be saved and maybe even property could be protected, wouldn't be okay to learn one more?