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.

Atlantic Hurricane Season ‘07: A Dim Outlook

Seven to 10 possible hurricanes on a total of 13 to 17 named storms – this is what NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center has announced today as the forecast for the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season. We have covered a number of of storm-related sources both this week and back in March. Time to put these tools to work and, please, let us know if we missed something of interest.

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.

Weather & Maps: Emerging Mashups

Weather.com recently launched a new interactive weather map which brings together near-real time cloud cover (satellite) and radar (precipitation) layers on Microsoft’s Virtual Earth maps and satellite images. This is an interesting, quick option for tracking severe weather at the local level. Of course, for those of you (like us) who don’t remember life before Google Earth (GE), gearthblog.com has put together an interesting KMZ file collecting several, live weather sources including a hurricane tracker (works for storms worldwide), global cloud coverage, and Weather Bonk (which includes webcam coverage of affected areas.)
The NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory and the University of Oklahoma have brought together an excellent collection of KMZ files under the lengthy heading of Warning Decision Support System — Integrated Information – these include CONUS Radar Reflectivity, Real Time NWS Warnings, Storm Reports, etc.

A word of caution: most KMZ/KML files we experimented with in the weather category, particularly dynamic layers, should not be considered ‘enterprise ready’ – meaning that they are often the result of voluntary efforts by GE enthusiasts and may be unreliable over time. The integration of live data with GIS or mapping software such as GE has great processing value (i.e. by allowing operators to quickly identify assets potentially affected by a severe weather event) but the collection phase should still take into account the reliability of sources and consider multiple sources.