Snow: Ready for 'Athena?'

This won't matter much to people in Pittsburgh or even Harrisburg, but the Weather Channel has decreed that our imminent snowstorm merits a name, Athena.

Thus its controversial experiment to name winter storms in the tropical-storm tradition has begun.

The cable giant says that naming "makes communications and information sharing easier, enabling consumers to better understand forecasts."

Don't expect anyone else to honor TWC's convention, however.

In its own emphatic way, the government has said it wants no parts of it, and Joel Myers, the founder of Accu-Weather Inc., is still steaming about the concept.

Myers calls the winter-storm naming a "clever media device" that in the end could undermine the credibility of meteorologists.

He said Accu-Weather has looked at winter-storm naming, but, "We've always rejected it."

He argued that winter storms have little in common with their distant tropical cousins. For example, winter storms can have multiple centers, unlike tropical storms.

The government imposes a hard criterion for a named tropical storm -- peak winds of at least 39 m.p.h.

It would be all but impossible to establish such a criterion for a winter storm, Myers argued.

"Winter storms are totally different," Myers said. "The effects on different places are variable. It's going to be random and arbitrary.

"Are you going to name an inch of slush?"