In the age of weather dramatisation, nothing goes off quite like a “bomb cyclone”.
For several days, almost every report about the severe low-pressure system developing off the east coast of Australia contained the explosive terminology.
The Bureau of Meteorology on Tuesday said the terminology was accurate – the low-pressure system met the technical terms for a “bomb cyclone” – but added “it is not terminology the Bureau of Meteorology uses”.
Similarly, one of two American researchers who officially coined the phrase almost 50 years ago has since rejected it as inappropriate.
The bureau had spent much of Sunday and Monday warning about the “vigorous” weather system developing off the east coast of Australia, which it said threatened a stretch of coastline 1000km long, was capable of dropping almost 200mm of rain across two days and would pack dangerously strong winds.
When the severe weather system hit land, its impact was as forceful as predicted on the NSW south coast, forcing evacuations, bringing trees down on houses and causing other damage.
Yet it left many residents of Sydney and other parts of the state who encountered nothing worse than steady rain and blowy conditions scratching their heads, wondering what all the fuss was about.
It wasn’t their first “east coast low” and it wouldn’t be their last.
For many Australians, this was the first they had heard of a “bomb cyclone”.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Frederick Sanders and McGill University meteorologist John Gyakum officially coined the term in a research paper they published in 1980, titled “Synoptic-Dynamic Climatology of the ‘Bomb’ ”.
The phrase was used to describe powerful cyclones, typically outside the tropics, whose energy built up from rapid drops in air pressure caused by hot and cold temperatures colliding. When the central air pressure of the weather system dropped 24 millibars in 24 hours, this qualified the storm as undergoing “cyclogenesis” and being categorised as a “bomb cyclone”.
Sanders, who died in 2006 and was renowned as a pioneer of storm forecasting, reportedly had been using the phrase since the 1960s but, outside MIT, the terminology was not recognised by other climatologists and meteorologists until his and Professor Gyakum’s paper was published.
While it remained a relatively obscure term for decades, The Washington Post brought it into the public consciousness in 2018 when it published a story about a massive storm brewing over the Atlantic Ocean, headlined “Bomb cyclone blasting East Coast before polar vortex uncorks tremendous cold late this week”.
Interviewed by an American online news site at the time about the phrase, Gyakum said he had stopped using the term, given the rise of terrorist attacks. “When I talk about these explosively developing storms, I go through the trouble of mouthing the terms ‘explosively developing’ and I don’t use ‘bomb’,” he said. “It’s somewhat inappropriate when you consider other aspects of the world right now.”
On Tuesday, senior meteorologist Jonathan How said the bureau also tried to avoid using the phrase. “We don’t really use (bomb cyclone) very much,” he told the Nine Network. “We just talk about a low-pressure system deepening very quickly because ‘bomb’ can sort of create a little bit more panic and (make it sound) a little bit more scary than what it actually is.”
A week and a half after the US dropped 14 of the world’s largest bunker-busting bombs on two Iranian facilities in a bid to stop Tehran developing and using a nuclear weapon, How has a point.
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