Earlier this year, The Weather Channel, owned in large part by Bain Capital, announced that it was going to take it upon itself to assign names to winter storms so that the public can easily keep track of them, similar to what is done internationally with hurricanes.
The Weather Channel is doing this completely on its own, after no coordination with any other weather forecasting outlet including the government-run National Weather Service, which is the official authority on serious weather matters in the country.
The Weather Channel took it upon itself to name winter storms in a power play to challenge the National Weather Service's authority. As a profit-oriented company, they want to attract eyes to their product. They're going on a media blitz to try to make "Winter Storm Alpha" or "Blizzard Draco" stick in the collective public conscience, sort of like "Snowmageddon" or "Hurricane Sandy."
They're doing this so that when people realize that only The Weather Channel is referring to "Winter Storm Draco," people will tune into their programming instead of reading better forecasts from local news stations or the National Weather Service.
No reputable meteorological organizations use names to refer to winter storms. Please help to alleviate confusion by resisting the urge to use The Weather Channel's arbitrary naming system. It only feeds into the degradation of weather information, and will further feed into the desire of profit-oriented sector of the weather business to eliminate the National Weather Service.
Muchas gracias.
(You can follow me on Facebook, which is a pretty good source of information as well. Hell, the Mayan prophecy of dooooom is going to be more accurate than The Weather Channel is on any given day...)