It's a hoot that the weather has been made to be so dramatic with terms like "polar vortex" and named storms for what used to be thought of as fairly pedestrian occurrences.
"Polar" refers to the poles, in this case the North geometric pole, and "vortex" is an exact description of what wind is doing in a polar vortex.
Storms have been given names since the early 19th century, so your "used to be" here is well beyond the threshold of living memory.
And is it really "entirely" in how I see it? I'm referring to the breathless intonation of modern weather talking heads as they discuss normal weather phenomena as a "polar vortex" (in scare quotes). They used to just say it was going to snow more or be colder. The use of "polar vortex" in that context definitely amps up the drama.
So, we have a very rare, very extreme weather phenomenon that’s hit multiple in the last 10 years after decades of static behavior. The wiki on the Polar Vortex even attributes the 2013 storm with popularizing the term due to the heavy reporting.
* technically it's always there around the north pole, but we only talk about it when it dips down into populated areas.
My interpretation of the parent post is that it refers to the naming of every typical winter storm during a season, which was begun by the Weather Channel in 2012. I do in fact remember the debate at the time over that practice.
Wikipedia gives only two examples of winter storm names predating 1900, "The Great Snow of 1717" and "The Schoolhouse Blizzard" or "Children's Blizzard" of 1888.
That seems to be a different practice than winter storms Ajax, Bella, Cara, Delphi, Echo and Ferus of the 2021-2022 season.
I'm not over 70, but you never used to hear "polar vortex" in popular weather forecasting broadcasts. I'm not a meteorologist, so I can't comment on its use by pros.
And you never used to hear about named storms unless they were tropical cyclones.
The point being, the weather phenomena is not new, nor is using polar vortex to describe it. And just because you hear about something in the media for the first time and it seems exaggerated, that does not necessarily invalidate it or somehow make it a "pedestrian event" being over-hyped. It could be, but in this specific case, it definitely does not. And those words, as explained elsewhere, are the correct words to use from a descriptive point of view.
> The earliest scientific papers describing the broad-scale tropospheric or stratospheric flow as a “circumpolar vortex” or “polar vortex” are from the late 1940s and early 1950s. (Although a much earlier usage appears on pg 430 of Littell’s Living Age Map, 12 November 1853.)
Because it was behaving in a manner consistent with at least a few thousand years.
> And you never used to hear about named storms unless they were tropical cyclones.
Which is no different to today?