Jeffrey Moro is a PhD candidate in English with a certificate in Digital Studies at the University of Maryland. His research is at the crossroads of digital media studies and the environmental humanities. His writing has also appeared in the speculative fiction section of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Prior to joining UMD, he was the Post-Baccalaureate Resident in Digital Humanities for the Five Colleges of Western Massachusetts. His website is jeffreymoro.com.
Authors | Jeffrey Moro
Articles on Amodern by Jeffrey Moro
GRID TECHNIQUES FOR A PLANET IN CRISIS
The Infrastructures of Weather Prediction
This essay addresses the cultural technique of the grid in the history of computational weather forecasting. First, I draw on the Kulturtechniken school of German media theory to establish the grid as a media technique for linking visual representation, mathematical processing, and geopolitical order. I then trace the emergence of the grid in the 1922 work of early weather forecaster Lewis Fry Richardson. Finally, I apply these findings to a contemporary forecasting glitch around Hurricane Ophelia's landing on the British Isles in 2017. To put my argument succinctly: grid techniques enable weather prediction to make equivalent real atmospheres and virtual models, further enabling computation’s conceptual and material control over the planet itself.