As we bid farewell to the 2008 hurricane season, I though I’d show one last hurricane website. The Historical Hurricane Tracks site, from NOAA, gives a valuable picture of hurricane activity over time.
The Historical Hurricane Tracks tool is an interactive mapping application that allows you to easily search and display Atlantic Basin and Eastern North Pacific Basin tropical cyclone data. Check out the Query Storm Tracks feature. Easily search for tropical cyclone tracks from Atlantic and Pacific data by entering a ZIP Code, latitude and longitude coordinates, city or state, or geographic region and then view the selected tracks on a map.
This page also links to reports on the deadliest and costliest hurricanes, calculated using data from 1851-2007. The Coastal Population Tool allows the user to search coastal population data compared to hurricane strikes by coastal county, from Maine to Texas. Tropical Cyclone Reports, written by National Hurricane Center specialists, as well as reports for the Atlantic and Eastern North Pacific Basins, are linked on this site. But perhaps the most interesting tool is the Query Expediter Tool, which allows to user to build a custom, embeddable URL to link users directly to online maps marked with specific storm tracks. Here, for example, is the link to the map of Hurricane Gustav’s track: http://maps.csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/viewer.html?QE=NAME&PACBASIN=655,654,653, and here is the map (wierdly distorted by WordPress, not NOAA):
