Back in the good old days, this type of thing was ignored. Now the NWS uses a microfine analysis to define some rain as a named storm.
Don’t worry about this being remotely like Sandy, it’s a very weak tropical storm that might peak at 55 mph sustained winds tomorrow, whereas Sandy was a major hurricane leaving the Bahamas and took a nasty westward turn south of Long Island — Philippe is racing northeast and will swerve into Maine on Monday, but there’s already a fairly strong low on track to meet up with it and the whole thing will result in maybe 60 mph peak gusts, 2 inches of rain and a tide increase of less than 2 feet.
Folks in New England just call that weather.
The really noteworthy thing about to happen on the east coast is the arrival of much colder air from the western Great Lakes region. That will be the main weather story.