Nick asks: > Is a hurricane a “complex system”? >
It depends. What is your metaphor (model) of a hurricane? If I wanted to understand how a hurricane forms, I might model dissipative structure formation in the presence of temperature and pressure gradients. I would call this a complex system. If I needed to add a hurricane track simulation to our Simtable, for the purposes of how my customers would use it for emergency planning, it would probably be enough to model its track as a random walker biased by global winds and a curve parameter to represent the Coriolis effect. I would not call this a complex system.
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