Analysis and evolution of the meteorological terminology from the update of the “essay on a Catalan meteorological vocabulary (1948)”

Glossaries, meteorological terminologies and dictionaries play an important role in disseminating scientific knowledge of the atmospheric sciences. Currently hundreds of glossaries and meteorological terminologies can be found in many languages that cover many regions and countries. However, few of them were published before 1950 (Miloslav et al., 2022). One of the oldest publications is the Catalan meteorological terminology (Fontserè, 1948), wrote in Catalan language, an unofficial language those years, to include Catalan as a scientific language. Despite it was written in 1941, was not published until 1948 due to political reasons.

Based on the original work done by Fontserè (1948), an update of the meteorological terminology in Catalan has been done including new terms and language expressions that have appeared in the period from 1948 to 2023, after 75 years after the original publication. Some of these new terms were defined by the authors previously, such us the anthropocloud (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropogenic_cloud ; Mazon et al., 2012), the flash heat (https://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Flash_heat, Mazon et al., 2014), or the meteodiversity (Mazon and Pino, 2017), among others.

An analysis about the number and the topics of the new terminology included in the updated version has been performed to evaluate the temporal evolution of the meteorological and climatology terminology and the knowledge of the atmospheric sciences since 1948. For instance, lot of terms on climate change and numerical simulation included in the new version cannot be found in the original work. An update of such old terminology is an opportunity to understand how meteorological language has changed, to disseminate the meteorological and climatological sciences, and also to quantify and understand the interest focus on these atmospheric sciences during the past decades.

 

References:

Fontserè E., 1948: Assaig d'un vocabulari meteorològic català. Institut d'Estudis Catalans. Barcelona.

Mazon J., Costa M., Pino D., Lorente J., 2012: Clouds caused by human activities. Weather, 67, 11, 302–306.

Mazon J., Pino D., and Barriendos M., 2014: Rapid and sudden advection of warm and dry air in the Mediterranean Basin. Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 14, 235–246, doi:10.5194/nhess-14-235-2014.

Mazon J., Pino D. (2017) Meteodiversity: a new concept for quantifying meteorological diversity. Weather 72(5):143–145

Müller, M., Kocánová B., and Zacharov P., 2022: Meteorological Glossaries and Dictionaries: A Review of Their History and Current State. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 103, E157–E180, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0295.1.