Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Hurricane Irene Links

Oddly enough, I haven't collected a lot of links.  The ones I found originally after moving here have proven to be fairly stable and reliable. 

While the whole of the Eastern Seaboard is looking over it's collective shoulders, the storm is predicted to stay mostly out to sea at this point with landfall in New England after clipping the outer banks.  All it takes is a wobble and that could change drastically.

The Florida Natives and Semi-Natives here tell that Hurricane Andrew was originally going to hit Downtown Fort Lauderdale but wobbled at the last moment and had landfall 40 miles south in Homestead.   It then erased the town for the most part. 

The original path for Hurricane Irene was basically coming ashore for a visit to Coral Gables and then a trip up I-95.  That would have been a serious problem for the economy here as it would have hit as a strong Category 2. 

Luckily for us, it's chewing up the Bahamas, and now is expected to clip the outer banks as a Cat 3, then visit Providence RI.  Not good since Narragansett bay will funnel all that storm surge water into the downtown areas then the storm will roll west of Boston.

Maybe it will wobble east again, we can hope.

At any rate, my links are:

Obviously the weather channel website for general info for your area.
http://www.weather.com

There are three other sites, all Hurricane focused.  They are all not considered "official" sites, however they have all had good links to the official sites as well as some good commentary - without the hype.  I tend to ignore the local TV and Radio stations since they get paid by keeping you there and spoon feeding you fear.

The first is FL Hurricane.  This is the one that I tend to hit first since it usually has all the graphics in one place.  There usually is a commentary about any active storms, a graphic link to the existing storm, and maps that you can play around with. 
http://flhurricane.com/

Hurricane City is another weather "enthusiast" site.  On this site there is a lot of commentary and back story.  It's got some links to historical data and sometimes they go on with a "radio" or a "TV" broadcast on the site.  If your curiosity is raised about a past storm, I've seen links on there showing the track of the storm center complete with a helpful google maps plot.
http://www.hurricanecity.com/

Finally there is the Hurricane Watch Net.  This site is run by the Amateur Radio groups and has more of an emergency feel to it.  If you still have a shortwave radio in the house (I do) you can tune into the emergency frequency and listen in.  Their focus is "this" storm, not the older ones.
http://www.hwn.org/

If you have any other links that are promising, feel free to add them in the comments. I'm always willing to surf another weather site.

For now, if you will excuse me, I have some wind chimes and other outside stuff to get stowed.   They're predicting steady winds of 25MPH with gusts.  Not really a big deal, but if we were to get a "microburst"...

No comments:

Post a Comment