As Hurricane Sandy batters the Eastern Seaboard

booom!

Hurricane Sandy – NASA image acquired October 28, 2012

Hurricane Sandy is currently doing it’s best, or worst, to disrupt Halloween  on the Eastern Seaboard of the USA.   Sandy is a vast storm, currently a swirling mass some 800km across and is trundling north up the coast.  Importantly, the wind speeds are increasing having risen from 120km/h (75mph) to over 140km/h (85mph).  Officially, Sandy is still a category 1 hurricane and the US has seen much stronger but it is the path of Sandy that is causing concern.  While he has not intensified in the same way as hurricanes that feed off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, he is moving towards densely populated states on the eastern seaboard.  The US government has, rightly, taken necessary precautions ordering thousands from their homes and closing schools. The question is, where will Sandy make landfall?

For anyone interested in finding out more about Hurricane Sandy GoGeo has compiled some resources.  For those interested in hurricanes and tropical storms in general there are some really useful links as well. As always, if you find anything useful which is not on the list, just add a comment and I will append it to the list.

Hurricane Sandy:

 

  • NOAA National Huricane Centre – The main source for hurricane information in the USA with the latest projected paths and forecasts updated regularly.
  • BBC Info page – great little collection of news, pictures and live updates from the Beeb
  • Wikipedia – as usual, a plethora of links and information which will grow during the event and provide an archive to material afterwards.
  • Google crisis map – a crisis map from Google with information about medical and evacuation centres in the areas likely to be affected. It also links to weather feed to display radar, cloud and predicted storm tracks.
  • ESRI Public Information map – showing similar data to the google map but in addition seems to drag in tweets and YouTube clips where it can.
  • Wind Map – A nice info-graphic showing the live wind vectors across America. (This is a live feed so i grabbed a map from 0500 hrs on 30th October 2012, just after the storm hit land)
  • ESA – data collected by ESA satellites including 3D structure of the hurricane from CloudSAT. Masses of images and data here.

Useful Hurricane Links

Some more links to useful hurricane and tropical storm resources.

  • ShareGeo – A subset of the data from the Historical Hurricane Center that shows all storms since the year 2000.
  • Historical Hurricane Tracks – This is a service run by NOAA and it provides a host of information about historic hurricanes.  You can download the data they hold by year, by oceanic basin or by name.  Data is provided in a variety of data formats including CSV, NetCDF and shapefile.

All major storms since 2000