This headline from Reuters is really unbelievable: " Hurricane sweeps across Europe." WTF?
The first sentence of the article is even worse: "Germans were told to stay indoors and many schools across the country closed early on Thursday as a rare hurricane bore down on the country, cutting air traffic at its biggest airport by half."
The only tropical storm on record to strike any part of Europe was Vince of 2005 (PDF), and it weakly passed over the Iberian peninsula as a tropical depression. I don't even have to check the weather to tell you that what Germany and much of the rest of Europe is currently experiencing is an extratropical cyclone, or winter storm, not a hurricane. I did check it, though, and you can see from the satellite image above (courtesy of the UK Met Office) that there ain't no hurricane over Europe.
Saying that Germany has been struck by a hurricane is additionally idiotic in that only the northern border of the country really has a coast, meaning that the track a hurricane would have to follow to get there is truly mind-boggling.
Not to mention the fact that this is not hurricane season in the Atlantic.
However, this kind of bone-headed news coverage does underscore an important point. If people are constantly getting confused about different kinds of large-scale cyclonic or rotating storms, it's in part because nature doesn't make it particularly easy to distinguish between cyclone types. As National Hurricane Center forecaster James L. Franklin (who I heard talk at the AMS meeting and then just ran into in the San Antonio airport) has put it:
Our classification system is a convenience for man, but Nature is not the slightest bit interested in our classifications of cyclones. There is a complete spectrum of storms between extratropical and tropical.
A convenience for man, perhaps, but one that Reuters clearly does not appreciate.
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I wonder if there may be some language confusion at work here.
In Swedish, the term "hurricane" ("orkan") is used to denote wind speeds above a particular threshold (33 meters per second), while not necessarily saying that the storm is tropical. I suspect Germans may have the same usage, and that Reuters, after reading German reports, simply translated the term without realizing that it has a more technical usage in English.
Might it just be a translation error? The storm system is called "Orkan Kyrill", where "Orkan" is the German term for storms of strength 12 on the Beaufort Scale. The term sounds similar to "hurricane" and I believe has the same etymology. But "Orkan" is not restricted to tropical cyclones and is just used for super-strong wind storms, which are most frequent in the fall and winter in Northern Europe. There is up-to-date info on Kyrill at wikipedia.de.
Then why does Reuters call it a "rare hurricane"?
I suspect you guys are right, actually, but it's still an idiot mistake by Reuters.
it's f-ing big wind. that's what matters to the people experiencing it, and most of those reporting on it. This kind of terminological dispute is pure pedantry. If reporters were making claims about the origins, and dynamics of the storm and getting key details wrong, you might have an interesting complaint.
"Then why does Reuters call it a "rare hurricane"?"
Why did Reuters think there were WMD in Iraq?
We're talking about something printed by a card-carrying member of the mainstream American press here.
Anything impossible is possible.
They call it a hurricane because they're confused, probably partly because it's legitimately called an "Orkan" in the local languages, and they call it rare because a storm of this ferocity is rare in Northern Europe.
Makes sense to me, Kai. But all in all, still an exceedingly poor showing by Reuters.
As for tbell, it matters because words have meanings.
One more thing:
I am following the storm because I have plenty of family in Germany. The distance from the North Sea Coast to Southern Germany is less than 400 miles, which for a big storm system isn't much at all. The storm hit 148 kilometers an hour in Northern Germany and all the way south in Austria they expect it to have maximum speeds of 140 kilometers an hour. Yes, it's slowing down but the distances back in the old country are just tiny compared to over here in the States.
I lived in West Germany when we had the jet stream touch the surface and flip over a number of aircraft at our airfield. The surface winds were almost 90mph and the pressure was IIRC somewhere in the low 900mb. Anyway, we used the Beaufort scale (as Kai says above) for damage assessment.
Best,
D
To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, "A storm is a storm is a storm." That's how ordinary folks see it. And having spent one autumn and winter in Germany and Denmark (and getting about on a motorcylce) I can attest to the ferocity of some storms off the North Sea. They can be very wet, very windy and very scary, especially on a motorcycle. Yes, I know the technical definition of "hurricane" is a tropical storm rotating about a center with sustained winds exceeding 74 mph (or the metric equivalent), but in popular usage, a hurricane is a big nasty storm. Here in the US our winter noreasters are not hurricanes, by definition, but they can be nasty and have high winds, especially along the seacost and be just as destructive. And I'm sure some locals call them hurricanes, even if to a New Englander or a Canadian Maritimer they are noreasters.
Check out the graphic on this FOCUS Information Agency news item about the storm. They've superimposed a satellite image of a hurricane over Europe.
That image is totally ridiculous....