Tropical Storm BETA Public Advisory
Another week and another storm in the Caribbean is going to cause havoc for residents. These storms with Greek names are just freaky, though I can assume if you are hit by one its name isn’t very important considering more pressing needs such as food, water, shelter. Anyway, you can track the storm using either ESRI’s storm tracker application or the Hurricane Tracker.
I’ve been keeping an eye on Wilma using the ESRI hurricane tracker mostly because I have many friends in the Fort Myers, FL area. Anyway I just noticed something on the tracker that made me look twice.
Say hello to Tropical Depression Alpha (hiding off there to the right of the image). So the counter has reset on the storm names. For those who haven’t heard:
In the event that more than 21 named tropical cyclones occur in the Atlantic basin in a season, additional storms will take names from the Greek alphabet: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and so on.
I wonder if this happens again next year if they will start naming the second batch of storm names. Amazing how quickly this has spun out of control. I’ll take the 120 degree days here in the summer over a hurricane, blizzard, earthquake, tsunami anytime. Hopefully when I wake up in the morning not too much damage will have been caused by Wilma. Good luck Florida.
Link – ESRI Hurricane Viewer
A nice feature about ArcWeb is these services are ready to go. No need to mashup something for the next hurricane. Anyway, as with Katrina and Rita, you can use the ESRI Hurricane Tracker to check up on the progress of Wilma. Unfortunately it is looking like it will be hitting the US, but hopefully it won’t be as large as Katrina or Rita. As with before, select “Current Hurricanes” from the Map Type in the upper right and navigate to the area off the coast of Honduras..
Also, don’t forget about the Geospatial One Stop Hurricane page where you can get all the latest data and information about the 2005 hurricane season.
Link – Hurricane Rita Base Map Index Page – via PubSub
NOAA just completed an aerial survey areas affected by Hurricane Rita. The areas were photographed on Sunday covered the coastal regions of Louisiana and Texas. They were flown last Sunday right after the hurricane hit. One hates to make comparisons with natural disasters, but these images look very similar to the ones from the tsunami that hit SE Asia last year.
Update – Go here if you want to get information about georeferencing the images for use in GIS.
Link – Multi-Dimensional Imagery from NOAA
The site is back up and running so if you want to check out the latest multi-dimensional imagery, now is the time.
I’ve got family in the Austin area so I’m very happy to see that the hurricane will be well to the east of them, but it looks like Houston will be getting more than before. The ESRI Hurricane Disaster Viewer is a great tool to keep up to date on the path. The live web services that ESRI is using is wonderful, I can’t imagine how all this will be when ArcExplorer is out and ESRI starts leveraging all this data inside ArcWeb.
I got a note from ESRI letting me know that they are helping local and federal government agencies prepare for Rita. It seems that everyone has learned much about what happened after the devastation of Katrina and I think everyone is being proactive with Rita.
ESRI’s online information will be updated to ensure people know they can request help for Rita in addition to Katrina. The infrastructure is already in place thanks to Katrina, so we’ll just add the appropriate links as they come in. The storm viewer will include Rita data as soon as it becomes available. Most of the data on the viewer will not need to be changed, and people can use it to study the area for potential impacts. The USPS delivery zone data, FEMA data, and satellite imagery will be updated as it becomes available. On the viewer, they set the extent of the Southeast U.S. Current Storms bookmark to show Rita and her track.
They best thing to do is probably bookmark the ESRI’s Hurricane Maps and Help page and subscribe to their RSS feed making sure you are up to date on how you can assist government agencies and private organizations that need help in responding during the 2005 hurricane season.