I’ve been a weather buff all of my life but haven’t had too much interest in hurricanes until recently when I found out a family member may be doing some work down in the area very soon. I’d found the tools on the internet to be somewhat lacking until today. Do you wonder where Hurricane Ike will hit or when Tropical Storm Hanna will pass? What about the projected storm path after it makes landfall and is downgraded? Hurricane season gets lots of people glued to the Weather Channel or local news to get the latest updates on developing storms. I don’t put a lot of faith in what most of the metorologists say so I often seek out the information on the web so I can interpret the data myself. One of the best places I found to do this is Stormpulse. (Google Earth is another one). Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can modify their appearance and add or subtract additional layers of data.

You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.

Base geographic imagery is provided by Nasa and Data is pulled from the National Hurricane Center and the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station, Dundee University, UK. The site has storm data going back to 1851, soyou can see the paths and intensity of previous hurricanes. There is even an API for embedding Stormpulse maps on other sites which I’m looking into for a page here on RCS.