Many of the contributions that I write for Forbes are inspired by things that I experience as a meteorologist or scientist. This post is one of them. My daughter plays competitive volleyball. One of the teams that she played recently was from Club Tsunami. People often approach me with statements like the following......."Oh that's right you are a meteorologist, can you tell me if the tsunami is going to strike Hawaii? We are going there in a few days on vacation." As I stared at the ceiling this morning in that familiar transition from deep sleep to "gosh, I really do not want to get up," I thought about four words or terms that people often asks meteorologists about that are actually not weather related.
Meteors: This one is somewhat understandable because the word meteorologist has the word "meteor" in the name.  When there is a big meteor shower, people will email or call me at the University of Georgia. Broadcast meteorologists also get inquiries. According to Marc Lallanilla in Livescience.com,
A meteor is an asteroid or other object that burns and vaporizes upon entry into the Earth's atmosphere; meteors are commonly known as "shooting stars." If a meteor survives the plunge through the atmosphere and lands on the surface, it's known as a meteorite.
By the way, if the meteor explodes into a fireball it is called bolide As I wrote in Forbes last year, "the term 'meteorology' seems to have originated in 340 BC when the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote a book on natural philosophy entitled Meteorologica......The manuscript was entitled Meteorologica because in those times, any particle which fell from the sky, or was suspended in the atmosphere, was called a meteor. Today, we distinguish between "meteors" (extraterrestrial meteoroids) and "hydrometeors" (particles of water or ice in the atmosphere)."
Tsunami: Usually when someone asks me about tsunami, I tell them that it is a term that they should be asking a geologist or oceanographer about, but I always proceed to explain it. NOAA defines a tsunami as,
a series of ocean waves generated by sudden displacements in the sea floor, landslides, or volcanic activity. In the deep ocean, the tsunami wave may only be a few inches high. The tsunami wave may come gently ashore or may increase in height to become a fast moving wall of turbulent water several meters high.
Last January I wrote in Forbes about something called a "meteorological tsunami" but it is different than an ocean tsunami.
Space weather processes and Earth. Source: NASA
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Space weather processes and Earth. Source: NASA
Space Weather: This one is a bit tricky for two reasons. It has "weather" in the name. The other tricky aspect is that some people associate it with things like storms on Jupiter or dust devils on Mars. In actuality, NASA defines space weather this way,
...the dynamic conditions in the Earth’s outer space environment, in the same way that “weather” and “climate” refer to conditions in Earth’s lower atmosphere. Space weather includes any and all conditions and events on the sun, in the solar wind, in near-Earth space and in our upper atmosphere that can affect space-borne and ground-based technological systems and through these, human life and endeavor. Heliophysics is the science of space weather.
Coronal mass ejections (pulses of magnetized plasma that the sun spews to the earth periodically) and solar processes have a significant impact on activities on Earth such as GPS systems, the electrical power transmission, radio communications, satellite communications, and satellite drag. Some experts have warned that a three trillion dollar economic disaster looms from a massive space weather event. Thankfully NOAA, whose budget was recently slated for large cuts, operates the Space Weather Prediction Center to provide early warnings of harmful solar events. I should also backtrack and mention that NOAA operates Tsunami Warning Centers for our protection also. NASA also monitors space weather threats with specialized satellites and models.
Gulf Stream: Okay, okay, I know...... this one is a bit of a stretch because the gulf stream is actually quite important for weather. Every now and then someone is talking to me about the "Gulf Stream" when I am pretty sure they mean "jet stream." The Gulf Stream is defined by NOAA's Ocean Service as,
an intense, warm ocean current in the western North Atlantic Ocean. It moves north along the coast of Florida and then turns eastward off of North Carolina, flowing northeast across the Atlantic. Off the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, the Gulf Stream flows at a rate nearly 300 times faster than the typical flow of the Amazon River. The Gulf Stream transports nearly four billion cubic feet of water per second, an amount greater than that carried by all of the world's rivers combined.
The Gulf Stream current.
NOAA GFDL
The Gulf Stream current. Source: NOAA GFDL
Jet streams are strong, narrow bands of wind in the upper level of the troposphere and separate boundaries of warm and cold air. Both jet streams and the Gulf Stream are very important to weather  in the United States but for different reasons. For an excellent scholarly overview of the role of the Gulf Stream on the atmosphere, an outstanding synopsis is published in the journal Nature. The role of the jet stream in weather processes is described at this useful National Weather Service weather tutorial, ironically called Jet Stream.
In the broadcast world, TV meteorologists are often considered Station Scientists and address all science questions covered. Meteorologists are well-trained physical scientists so should be able to answer questions about any of these four words. Even if they are not "technically" meteorological. By the way, what other words did I miss?