Scott Brinton

Weathering the hurricane reporting

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I spent a chunk of last Wednesday staring at my TV, watching squiggly lines accumulate on the Weather Channel’s map of the Atlantic Seaboard. They represented model tracks of Hurricane Joaquin, and all but one looked like they were pointed directly at my home.

So I did what any half-crazed Hurricane Sandy victim might do: I ran out to a box store and bought 750 pounds of playground sand to fashion 200 sandbags in the hope of fending off yet another flood.

My God, I thought, here we go again: another tempest. More mass destruction. Months of our lives turned upside down.

A funny thought hit me the next morning: Why did one line veer eastward, out to sea? The other plots seemed to shift like beach sand in the wind, but this one had remained unchanged for the previous couple of days.

The meteorologists pooh-poohed this outlier. They called it simply the “European model,” without identifying its source. They said it was a “usually reliable” model, but 16 or 17 other Joaquin tracks, including one from the National Weather Service, predicted that this monster storm would strike the U.S. mainland, somewhere between the Carolinas and Long Island.

They just had no idea where.

My curiosity piqued, I did a little digging into the European model. I remembered that it had correctly predicted that Sandy would slam into the U.S., while other models, including the NWS track, forecast that Sandy would meander out to sea. What is the European model? I wondered.

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts produces it, I learned via Google. According to the ECMWF website, it’s an independent, intergovernmental organization based in the United Kingdom. Thirty-four member nations comprise the organization, all of which pay taxes to support it. Established in 1975, it has a staff of 280 from 30 countries. All of its weather data is disseminated free of charge to member countries. It also sells data to non-member states and organizations.

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