Top Five Hurricane Information Sources and Tools

In occasion of the announcement of Dean as the first hurricane of the ‘07 Atlantic Season . . . these are at the top of our list:

1. NOAA-NWS National Hurricane Center
   The mother of all sources – most other services rely on the National Weather Service data to start with. RSS updates include ‘basin-wide’ feeds: here’s the Atlantic.
2. NOAA Weather Radio All Hazard
   When all else fails (and you better believe it will, if you are among those really needing the news) this radio signal will carry on the news.
3. IBISEYE
   Possibly the most effective mesh up of weather data and Google Maps.
   
4. The Miami Herald Hurricane page – for which much credit must be give to the excellent Tropical Weather section at Weather Underground (also check out their nifty flash-based storm tracker.)
5. Google Earth addicts will find the best collection of live weather and storm tracking info in this KMZ collection we covered back in March. (Thanks to GEBlog.com) Includes hurricanes live positions, global cloud coverage, NOAA severe weather, etc.

Money Laundering: Reference Reports Update

Security and Legal departments of financial institutions and multinational organizations may want to take note of a couple of recent publications on the subject of money laundering. The International Monetary Fund just released a detailed assessment of Gibraltar Anti-Money Laundering (AMF) and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) efforts. The report lists not only the core aspects of these activities but some of their shortcomings and various recommendations of good reference value. Also, earlier this month, The U.S. Departments of Treasury, Justice, and Homeland Security issued the 2007 National Money Laundering Strategy, “a report detailing continued efforts to dismantle money laundering and terrorist financing networks and bring these criminals to justice.” Not be forgotten is the regularly-updated Specially Designated Individuals List maintained by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) within the US Treasury.

Storm Info Mashup

Ibiseye is an interesting storms information mashup maintained by Florida’s Heraldtribune.com. Google Maps and Weather Underground data are merged here in a fairly elegant and effective fashion, just in time for ‘07 hurricane season.

Country Reports on Terrorism 2006

Since 2004, the US State Department’s Patterns of Global Terrorism report has been replaced by the Country Reports on Terrorism. The reports, which are published annually by April 30 and are compiled with data provided by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), can be found here.

New Maps Mashups: 911, Crime and More

Incident1 is an interesting example of what can be done today by tapping into open source data and applications, producing something that just a couple of years back was available only to public agencies, at exorbitant costs. Although still limited only to some regions within the US, this mashup maps (a sample of) recent incidents and emergency calls data from police, fire and EMS. Also relevant to security and command center operators are USA Today’s report on ‘America’s Most Unsafe Cities’, promptly mashed by Morgan Quitno Press, as well as the US EPA Superfund locator.