After TWC named its first system in November 2012, the NWS Eastern Region headquarters reminded its forecast offices that it didn't name Winter Storms, however, the NWS Weather Forecast Office in Buffalo, New York unofficially named six systems after the fact during the winter of 2012-13. After reading a headline entitled "Brutus expected to bury Bozeman" students at the Bozeman High School in Montana reached out to TWC and provided them with four years worth of classical Latin and Greek names as they wanted to raise awareness of the language. During the season, TWC did not use any quantitative method to name the systems and started to use the names provided by the Bozeman high school after it had exhausted the list of names that it had preselected. After the season had ended, TWC reviewed the systems it had assigned a name to and felt that 90% of the systems deserved to be named, based on the impacts they had on a regional/national basis. They also determined that the project had been a success after over a billion impressions were recorded on Twitter and numerous schools, agencies and media outlets had started to use it. As a result, they decided to use the named storms of 2012-13 as a benchmark and developed a quantitative method for deciding when to name future storms, which they entitled the Integrated Meteorological Population and Area Calculation Tool (IMPACT). This tool allowed TWC to calculate the population and area that is forecast to be impacted by a winter storm, based on thresholds set by the NWS for winter weather warnings and advisories.
