Acronyms
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is The Weather Notebook. Lets test your acumen for weather acronymsŠready? Okay, first one: AWIPS. Next, ASOS. Try this one: , NESDIS.

Stumped? Commentator David Laskin gives us the answers.

No one seems to know for sure what got the National Weather Service hooked on acronyms. I first became aware of this name game when a government forecaster I was chatting with kept going on about AWIPS. I was about to interject that this was really none of my business, when the staffer explained that AWIPS stands for the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, a kind of one-stop shopping for meteorological data. I'm a quick study, so I realized ASOS isn't something you put on steak but yet another acronym for, ready? -- the Automated Surface Observing System that is making the old eye to the sky obsolete.

Now I'm a regular weather acronym whiz. NESDIS? No, it's not Yiddish for "Who needs this?" - but the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service. And finally there's my all-time favorite SLOSH - which is not only an acronym for Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes but an inspired bit of onomatopoeia because it sounds like what it is, namely a model for computing how high water will slosh during tropical storms.

I haven't been able to track down who's got the job of coining all these wacky acronyms, but clearly someone in the National Weather Service is having one heck of a good time with our tax dollars.

David Laskin ponders acronyms in Seattle, Washington. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is supported by the NSF, National Science Foundation.