This content was sourced from a real blog post. I’ve swapped out the company name to add some anonymity. I’ve also removed the two visuals as they identified the company. The post was published three days after the event it describes.
The original post
On October 24th, Hurricane Otis underwent a rapid intensification phase right before hitting the vicinity of Acapulco, Mexico, setting a record for the speed at which the storm strengthened.
“Apex’s global forecasts powered by our proprietary radio occultation data produced a stronger Hurricane Otis than other models. Most weather models completely missed this rapid intensification, leaving those in its path unprepared. Apex continues to build on our robust and industry-setting radio occultation capabilities to improve global forecasting models. Our emerging microwave sounders will only help make forecasts better for the industry in a world increasingly impacted by climate change,” says Mike Eilts, General Manager of Apex’s Weather and Earth Intelligence Team.
As The Atlantic reported, Otis’s explosive intensification caught many weather models off guard. New weather models like Apex’s satellite-based solutions are needed to warn of impending storm escalations. Climate change will continue to create weather patterns that leave many unprepared.
The Category 5 storm, which increased in wind speed by 115-mph in just 24 hours, is only the second storm to intensify so rapidly. Hurricane Patricia, increased by 120-mph in 24 hours in 2015.
Unlike hurricane Patricia, Otis did not weaken before making landfall. Otis is the strongest landfalling Pacific hurricane on record, battering the resort city of Acapulco.
Most weather models missed the rapid intensification, leaving those in its path unprepared. Apex’s analysis reveals that our global forecasts powered by our proprietary radio occultation data produced a stronger hurricane than other models.
Apex continues to build on our robust and industry-setting radio occultation to improve global forecasting models. Our emerging microwave sounders will only help make forecasts better for the industry in a world of climate change driven rapid intensification of storms.
“Apex’s emerging microwave sounders will only help make forecasting better for the industry in a world increasingly impacted by climate change,” adds Tom Gowan, Lead of Data Assimilation and Modeling at Apex.
My high level thoughts
This is not meant to be an example of a communication with a colleague, it’s just to give you an idea of how I think.
The biggest things that stick out to me in this post are the tone and the timing. The tone gets too close to bragging for me, and I find the timing of the post disrespectful or at least insensitive. Hurricane Otis was a tragedy. There was loss of life, livelihood, and property. Posting something like this three days after the event feels wrong. If I was going to post something like this, I’d allow for more time to pass after the event.
I think product comparisons can be useful but I think they need to be done tastefully. In this blog post, it’s great the model outperformed competitors but given the situation, how useful was it? It’s not clear if the people of Acapulco benefited from the model that outperformed the others, so it feels wrong to talk about how well the model performed if it didn’t help residents.
I think rewriting this piece to use a different tone and approach, and cleaning up some of the duplicative content could go a long way.
My edited version
You could rewrite this post in a lot of different ways. You could focus it on rapid intensification, make it a general post on forecasting extreme weather, build it around the proprietary technologies, etc. I decided to keep the same general scope but I changed the framing.
Hurricane Otis reminds us we have a lot more work to do
On October 24th, Hurricane Otis rapidly intensified and struck Acapulco, Mexico and the surrounding area. There was loss of life, livelihood, and property. The rapid intensification was missed by many weather models and is a reminder that we have a lot more work to do in the weather forecasting space.
When comparing Apex’s forecast with other models, there’s a noticeable bump in intensity in our forecast that isn’t present in other models. This indicates that we were on the right track, but still not accurate enough nor were we able to forecast far enough in advance to give people a proper warning. You can see the difference in forecasted wind speeds in the image below.
[Image comparing models would go here]
Part of the reason we could forecast the rapid intensification at all was due to our radio occultation data. Radio occultation is a way to remotely measure the atmosphere, and we’re improving this technology all the time. We’re also working on microwave sounders that will provide us with additional data.
Building reliable forecasts for extreme weather events is a critical part of Apex’s mission. We’ve made a lot of progress, but Hurricane Otis is a devastating reminder that we aren’t where we need to be.