As Ophelia was on final approach to Ireland, the storm merged with a cold front and a robust upper-atmospheric disturbance, morphing into a strong so-called post-tropical cyclone with an atmospheric structure like a powerful nor’easter.

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The National Hurricane Center dutifully changed the storm’s name to Post-Tropical Cyclone Ophelia in its advisories, acknowledging the meteorological transition. According the meteorological dictionary, Ophelia was indeed a post-tropical cyclone — an organized low-pressure system that originated in the tropics, but no longer had tropic characteristics, scientifically speaking.

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We are confronted with the obvious question, however: Is Post-Tropical Cyclone Ophelia really the best name for a weather system that is forecast to hit land with hurricane-force winds? No. And this is not a theoretical question for us.

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy technically morphed into Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy before it hit land and wreaked havoc on the most populated part of the United States.

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At the Weather Channel, where I work, we thought that post-tropical felt too much like “post-danger,” so we switched the name to Superstorm Sandy the moment that the meteorologically accurate but innately less threatening-sounding post-tropical nomenclature took effect.

The Irish and the Brits handled Ophelia somewhat differently. This type of storm — though not as potent as Ophelia — frequently has an impact on the British Isles in the fall and winter. To elevate and coordinate public communications, the British and Irish meteorological services got together a couple of years ago and came up with a naming scheme for potentially disruptive storms. A typical version of this storm would have been called Storm Brian had it not been born out of Hurricane Ophelia. In these situations, the naming system wisely calls for carrying on with the tropical name. Brian was pushed onto the next storm, which is due over the weekend.

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Some media outlets in Britain referred to the system as Storm Ophelia, adopting their standard winter-storm-naming paradigm. The government weather services generally called it Ex-Hurricane Ophelia, which elevated the threat above a typical winter storm — a smart move. Some Irish and British media went with the full Monty and used simply Hurricane Ophelia, aligning the name with the hurricane-force winds that were forecast.

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To be clear, whenever a post-tropical cyclone has posed a threat to land, the National Hurricane Center’s advisories and discussions have accurately and fully highlighted the danger. Most people, however, never see those bulletins, and increasingly the headline is the message. With the decline of websites and television — except in rare extreme events — and the ascent of mobile-phone apps as the platform of choice for public consumption of weather information, it has become increasingly important that the salient point of any weather alert is succinct, clear and fits on a mobile-phone screen.

The fact is, when Hurricane Ophelia linguistically morphed into Post-Tropical Cyclone Ophelia in National Hurricane Center bulletins, the intrinsic colloquial message was that the storm had been downgraded. The meteorological dictionary might say otherwise, but that’s what people thought, and will always think.

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Words matter. And if the words imply a message that is not intended, they need to be reevaluated.

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The solution is to separate the nomenclature used to label a storm from its technical meteorological status. Currently, the name of the storm describes the bucket in which the weather system resides. Those buckets are differentiated by the strength of the strongest winds in the storm, the organization of the circulation, and the energy source by which the storms run — tropical and northern storms run off different meteorological processes. When a storm moves from one meteorological bucket to another, the name changes, even though the threat to land may not. Therein lies the issue.

A more modern system, which takes into account the short-form nature of mobile-phone communications, would be to retain the hurricane label through a transition to technical post-tropical-cyclone status if the storm still presents the threat of hurricane conditions on land. The meteorological transition would be noted in the text of the bulletin, of course, allowing for verification after the fact, but the unintended consequence of renaming a storm with a continuing hurricane-wind hazard to something that sounds less threatening would be removed.

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Hurricane Ophelia would have remained Hurricane Ophelia until there was no longer a threat to land from hurricane-force winds. Hurricane Sandy would have remained Hurricane Sandy through landfall.

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