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.
