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September 29

"Areal" flood watch ?

The US National Weather Service has for some reason started to use this bizarre word, instead of the shorter "area" even though there is obvious potential for confusion with "aerial" (flooding spotted by plane ?): [1]. Can anyone figure out why they decided to do this ? Are they fans of the Little Mermaid ? :-) StuRat (talk) 16:46, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Areal" seems to be an attested English word; see Wiktionary:areal, supported by the Cambridge Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, although I admit I've never heard of it until just now. Alansplodge (talk) 17:48, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's more precise, and in alignment with the scientific literature. Moreover, it's an adjective, and that allows more cromulent grammatical constructions than would be available if for some reason we wanted to avoid the word. Compare e.g. "areal estimates" in this scientific publication [2]. Here's about 8k more science articles with "areal" in the title [3]. Here's about 500 scientific articles, using "areal" in the title, and written before 1960 [4]. In my experience, it's most common in the remote sensing community. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:30, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I am a bit surprised that Alansplodge has never run across the word, which seems to me not such an obscure one. However this particular usage does seem a bit strange. I think of "areal" as relating to area in the sense of a mathematical quantity or physical measurement (so many square meters, say), not as "pertaining to a given region or area". --Trovatore (talk) 20:43, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In my defence, I'm not much of a scientist, and in general British speech, "area" seems to be used as an adjective, such as "area car" (a police cruiser) and London Area Control Centre. Still, we live and learn. Alansplodge (talk) 23:00, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, American speech too, though I'd call it a noun adjunct rather than an adjective. SemanticMantis suggests that "areal" is being used here as meaning "fully two-dimensional, rather than approximately one-dimensional". If that's the intended meaning, then it's not well captured by "area", I think. (Which is not to say that "areal" makes everything clear.) --Trovatore (talk) 23:59, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously I'm not much of a grammarian either! Alansplodge (talk) 21:03, 30 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

It's a flood watch that pertains to an area, rather than e.g. a roughly linear region, like stream. I don't feel like finding one at the moment, but there are flood warnings/watches for particular streams. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:45, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

EO indicates "areal" (adjective form of "area") has been around since at least the 17th century.[5] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:20, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

The first cite in the OED is from 1676, but it seems to have been a rare word in the UK (though occasionally used in American geography) until it started being used in American linguistics starting with the Journal of American Oriental Sociology in 1944. Dbfirs 11:31, 30 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

In triangle geometry, barycentric coordinates for the location of a point relative to a triangle are also called areal coordinates because they give relative areas of certain sub-triangles. Loraof (talk) 22:57, 29 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Does the US National Weather Service have many Bristolians working for it? DuncanHill (talk) 00:10, 30 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@StuRat: So, I'm not 100% sure on why the word "areal" specifically was chosen, but the specifications for the product can be found in NWS Directive 10-922. The use of the word areal, in this case, is to differentiate between a flood watch or warning for an area (polygon, technically...see here) and a flood watch or warning for a river forecast point. Also related, but separate, are flash flood watches and warnings, which are a short-duration, event-driven product for rapid and life-threatening flooding in the event of excessive rainfall or a dam or levee failure (see flash flood warning). Basically, you can think of it this way: areal flood watch/warning for a polygonal area (counties for the watch) where flooding is expected, river flood watches/warnings for when a river or stream is expected to exceed pre-defined flood stages at specific points along the river/stream, and flash flood watches/warnings, for short-duration, life-threatening flash flooding. I might note that there is discussion in the weather service about potentially folding together some of the flood products (see category two here), as there is some concern that the large suite of flood products is confusing to the public. Ks0stm ^{(T•C•G•E)} 00:36, 30 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Ks0stm: Thanks! I thought such a directive must exist, but was unable to find it :) SemanticMantis (talk) 15:49, 30 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I can't prove it, but it's possible "areal" is used in contrast to "local". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:33, 30 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks all. I knew why they wanted to distinguish from river flooding, but what I was asking about is why they choose the far less common word "areal" rather than the extremely common word "area", especially since "areal" sounds identical to "aerial", and hence is doubly confusing. StuRat (talk) 00:28, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

"Areal linguistics" is a very common term in that field, and deals with characteristics that are common between languages which ar geographically contiguous, but not very closely related genetically. For example, English, French, and Spanish all have a definite and indefinite article and use -s as the most common marker of the plural. Yet the plural in s is not common in more eastern Romance dialects or other Germanic dialects, and neither Latin nor proto-Germanic used articles. See areal feature, Sprachbund.μηδείς (talk) 23:50, 1 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]