Aaron brown died last year. That news guy.

The first academic paper on ARs came out in the early 90s. They weren’t “discovered” until microwave satellite imagery became more widespread and people saw the channels of water vapor extending from the tropics to the midlatitudes. The term got really popular in the 2010s when the research group out of Scripps in California got a bunch of funding. Their director is good at marketing and media outreach and the media loves a catchy weather term. Their AR 1-5 category scale is relatively new…it’s been around for maybe 5-6 years. I did research on them so I have a lot of opinions about them. You just have to remember that most of the research and terminology on them is California-centric. Around here the biggest thing is which direction they come from. This round is straight out of the west which is a recipe for rain shadows but very bad for Cascade rivers. The one on Wednesday looks like it’s going to stall when pointed at the Central Cascades which is especially bad. It could be a serious disaster. The ones that come from the south produce the best rain totals in the lowlands north of Tacoma.

This took me like 30 seconds of googling. Also, the way you said "not anecdotal at all, it's just based on stories from my youth" was low key pretty funny. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/s41598-022-15474-2.pdf

In the semi-believable mid range, Euro looks a lot more like GFS than GEM.