Meteorologist smackdown: 'Snowicane,' or just hot air?

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - The snowmenclature smackdown among meteorologists started with "snowmageddon" and "snowpocalypse."

Then, when last week's wind-whipped snowstorm headed for winter-weary Long Island and the rest of the Northeast, the folks at AccuWeather Inc. warned of a coming "snowicane."

That did it for the more reserved National Weather Service, which accused the for-profit forecasters of overhyping to the point of inciting panic.

The Weather Channel, an AccuWeather competitor, also took issue with the word.

As "snowicane" foreshadowed impending wind-and-snow doom Wednesday on AccuWeather's Web site, National Weather Service meteorologist Craig Evanego said the federal forecasters were taking a more measured approach, because the storm hadn't yet fully formed.

"It's almost inciting the public, inciting panic," Evanego said of AccuWeather's terminology.

His weather service colleague, meteorologist Roy Miller in Mount Holly, N.J., put it bluntly to The Morning Call newspaper in Allentown, Pa. "It's not responsible to be putting out things like this," he said.

The newspaper called the brouhaha a "meteorologist smackdown."

Richard Grumm, the government service's chief science and operations officer in State College, said science and "getting people's attention and entertainment" each serve a purpose.

"Scientifically, I have my own opinion of what a hurricane is," he added. "The word 'snowicane' - I have a glossary of meteorology; it doesn't exist."

A key meteorological measure of a hurricane is sustained winds of at least 74 mph. As last week's storm barreled into New England, it slung wind gusts into that range and higher - but those winds were not sustained. It therefore failed to achieve hurricane status, though it knocked out power to more than 1 million homes and businesses.

The number of outages was cut nearly in half by midday yesterday.

Evan Myers, chief operations officer of AccuWeather, defended the choice of words and said his firm wasn't trying to panic anyone. "The storm performed as advertised," Myers said, noting, among other things, the coastal flooding from eastern Long Island to Maine.

AccuWeather's Web site Saturday took up the "snowicane" defense: "Our concern was that the storm might be taken too lightly by the public if we stuck to the norm of calling the system a nor'easter, snowstorm, or even a blizzard."

It cited wind gusts of 90-plus mph off the New England coast.