Category 6 Hurricane
How do you feel about naming winter storms?
Indifferent to names. I do think blizzards should be categorized by intensity after witnessing the Buffalo, NY blizzard during Christmas in 2022. I've been in so many blizzards that are just hyped up winter storms but ultimately meet minimum blizzard criteria, barely. The difference between that and what I experienced in Buffalo with feet of snow, blizzard conditions for 3 straight days and gusting winds to 100mph with temps at or below zero was closer to "Day After Tomorrow" than it was the typical blizzard.
Same with ice storms. We haven't seen a really high end ice storm in decades. The 2021 Texas storm gets labeled as an ice storm but really it was just a light glazing of ice and a little sleet. The damage from that event was extreme cold in a place that had really just ignored the risk to infrastructure. The 1994 ice storm that impacted the MS Delta is another example of something that will eventually happened. Place that storms over a Texas or a strip of metros and things will get very interesting. That storm had over 2" of ice, pretty much took out every tree and powerline across a dozen counties and took months to clean up. Put that same storm in a metro today and all powerlines go down, trees go down, cell towers literally collapse due to the weight. It would take weeks to restore power and coms.
There are winters in US history that people simply would not believe. In 1899 the MS River was frozen solid in New Orleans. In 1895 Houston got 20" of snow in a day. In 1963 Memphis got 16" of snow in a day and over 2' from one storm and was basically shut down for a week. Whether or not these extreme winter events are still possible due to warming is really undetermined but if something like those winters happened today it would be catastrophic. People really underestimate winter.