Hurricane Modeling? More, Please, Sir

Dr. Ryan Truchelut’s Weathertiger’s Hurricane Watch, on Substack, published “Atlantic’s Next Top Model: Hurricane Watch Weekly Column for July 11th,” and I found this column very interesting. This particular column asks, “How do the leading hurricane models stack up against each other, and the NHC?”

This Substack newsletter is a bit in the weeds for many of us, but this was just the sort of coverage I needed as I work on Dear Josephine, Book 2, The Steep Climes Quartet, which I expect out by early spring 2024 (and, yes, hope does spring eternal). Book 1, Kill Well, just published.

The Josephine in the title is a named hurricane and the devastation of the Gold Coast (Miami and South Beach area) forms much of the background for this book. One of the characters is a young post-doc working on improving hurricane prediction models, and Dr. Truchelut’s column helps me reality test my presentation of what the young researcher is doing, and no doubt I’ll be cribbing all manner of jargon and abbreviations from his column.

I’m in the process of exploring climate change-related long content forms available on the web, starting with Medium, which I consider a social media platform for longform content, and I’m seeing that much that plagues social media generally is found specifically in Medium, where clickbait titles and hyper-iconoclast positions thrive. My sense is that Substack has a higher percentage of better writing, although this platform is hardly immune to clickbait titles. One interesting point I’ll keep exploring is how the business models of these two platforms compare; my early sense of this is that Substack has the better business model for the writers and this likely helps draw better writing. I’ll have to more deeply investigate the ratio of climate doomers on Substack in comparison to Medium, for example, to test this assumption, but my current bet is that Medium wins out on this regrettable development in climate change writing.

 

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