Articles by Paul Douglas

Image of wind turbines in a foggy field during sunrise
December 8

The Clean Energy Revolution Will Be Weather-Optimized

The only predictable thing is change. You can live in the past, or you can embrace the future. My take: With few exceptions, what worked in the 1970s probably won’t work in the 2030s. Technology evolves and improves, and policy imperatives shift over time. The climate crisis demands creativity to power the economy without emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Earth is approaching a tipping point — one that requires new and reliable sources of clean energy. A Brief Overview of Energy in the United States In the United States, renewable sources of energy generation are accelerating, accounting for...

Hurricane Florence
April 18

Will a New GFS Weather Model Upgrade Close the Gap with The European Model?

Image credit: NOAA Are you with Team GFS or Team ECMWF, the “European Model”? I hate to pick sides, but as a meteorologist I defer to the weather model that, consistently, is most accurate. Of course I’m rooting for the “American Model”, the GFS or Global Forecast System, to win. But here’s the thing: if you’re sanding a table or building a deck you want to use the best tools at your disposal, right? So it goes with weather forecasting. Meteorologists examine scores of models, looking for consistency, continuity, and trends – ultimately choosing a blend of model solutions that...

smoke coming out of industrial chimneys
April 6

Tracking Current and Future Global Air Quality with AerisWeather

An old joke insists that Californians don’t trust air they can’t actually see. Unfortunately, air pollution is no laughing matter. More than 95% of the world’s population breathes unsafe air, according to recent research. People living in urban areas in the world’s developing countries are most at risk from both outdoor and indoor air pollution. Experts estimate that exposure to air pollution contributed to more than 6 million deaths worldwide in 2017. A staggering one in three people worldwide faces the double whammy of unsafe air, both indoors and out. Globally an estimated 2.9 billion people are at risk. The...

AerisWeather
{{page_content}}