Cloudburst, weather bomb or water bomb? A review of terminology for extreme rain events and the media effect

For the past four years, we have been tracking the British, French and Italian press to examine the genesis and establishment of a new weather term: the ‘water bomb’ or ‘bomba d'acqua’ in Italian. The term has, today, become established in Italy to describe a cloudburst (‘nubifragio’ in Italian) that is newsworthy. That is, the cloud bursts to produce heavy rain over a populated area within the newspaper catchment to cause localised damage. The term became well established during the stormy and damaging summer of 2014 in Italy, being used 54 times across 64 Italian newspapers over the period of analysis (13 July–16 August 2014). The establishment of the term is interesting, and it shows how terminology can be introduced by the media, without regard for existing terms that are already appropriate. It can also cause confusion due to direct conflict with well-established terms for the same phenomena or with terms that use the same syntax, such as ‘weather bomb’, but which are used for entirely different phenomena. © 2017 Royal Meteorological Society