Online Hurricane Resources

 

 

 

# 5636

 

Ready.gov reminds us that there are three important steps to preparedness.

 

 

 

Luckily the third step – staying informed – gets easier every year as the number of online resources for tracking severe weather improves.

 

Since the 2011 Atlantic Tropical Storm Season has begun, today I’ve a list of some of my favorite online Hurricane resources. Some of these are `official government’ portals of information, while others are run by hurricane and severe weather enthusiasts.

 

While some very good information and analysis can be had through non-official channels on the internet, you should only rely on local emergency management officials, the National Hurricane Center, and the National Weather Service for:

• forecasts
• warnings
• evacuation recommendations.

 

 

The first stop on our list is the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.  These are the real experts, and the only ones you should rely on to track and forecast the storm.

 

 

Last year there were some significant changes in how the NHC will advise us on hurricanes.   Some of the (excerpted) highlights include:

Watches and warnings for tropical storms and hurricanes along threatened coastal areas will be issued 12 hours earlier than in previous years.

• Tropical storm watches will be issued when tropical storm conditions are possible along the coast within 48 hours.
• Tropical storm warnings will be issued when those conditions are expected within 36 hours. Similar increases in lead-time will apply to hurricane watches and warnings.

 

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale will become operational.  The scale keeps the same wind speed ranges as  the original Saffir-Simpson Scale for each of the five hurricane categories, but no longer ties specific storm surge and flooding effects to each category.

 

The size of the tropical cyclone forecast cone will be adjusted.

 

The cone represents the probable track of the center of a tropical cyclone, and is formed by enclosing the area swept out by a set of imaginary circles placed along the forecast track (at 12, 24, 36 hours, etc.).  The size of each circle is set so that two-thirds of historical official forecast errors over a 5-year sample fall within the circle.

 

The circle radii defining the cones in 2010 for the Atlantic and eastern North Pacific basins are given in the table below.

 

 

 

The second official information source you should have bookmarked is you local Office of Emergency Management.  Here you’ll be able to access local warnings, flood maps and evacuation information.

 

To find it, you can Google or Yahoo search with your county/parish name and the words `Emergency Management’.   Below you’ll find a screenshot of the entry page to my county’s page.

 

 

If you are on Twitter, you should also follow @FEMA, @CraigatFEMA, @NHC_Atlantic, @NHC_Pacific and @ReadydotGov.

 

The NOAA’s NWS National Hurricane Center in Miami also has a Facebook page, where you can keep up with the latest tropical developments.

 

 

For those who like to look at satellite imagery (and who doesn’t?), you’ll find a treasure trove of continually updated photos and movie loops at NOAA’s Satellite Imagery page.

 

 

Beyond the official channels there are resources for those who wish to follow these storm more closely, to participate in online discussions, or who would like independent assessments of storm tracks or movement.

 

These are not substitutes for the National Hurricane Center’s forecasts or your local office of Emergency Management advisories.

 

And while some of these sites have some very talented and knowledgeable amateur meteorologists, until you know the players and their track records, you really don’t know who is worth listening to, and who isn’t.

 

You can learn a lot from the online Hurricane discussion forums, but Caveat Lector when it comes to forecasts and predictions.

 

The first stop on the unofficial tour is Weather Underground’s Tropical weather page.  This is an extremely comprehensive website, and a good source of global weather information. Here you’ll alos find Dr. Jeff Masters (a co-founder of Weather Underground), who writes his well respected WunderBlog.

 

For those who like to `look under the hood’, my hometown (Tampa Bay) Fox TV station has a terrific hurricane page, with access to numerous (animated) hurricane forecast models.

 

For hurricane geeks, this is about as close to weather nirvana as you can get.

 

 

 

While there are dozens of other hurricane resource and tracking/discussion sites out there, I’ll just mention a couple I’ve used in the past.

 

First is Hurricane City, which has been around since 1997, and boasts an active discussion board, up-to-date NHC advisories, and frequent live video broadcasts during the hurricane season via their hurricane TV  channel.

 

And then there’s storm chaser Mark Sudduth’s Hurricanetrack.com, which also features live video, often from inside the storm.

 

Both of these sites have free access and paid subscription access levels. I offer these as examples of a genre, but without specific recommendation. Their usefulness to you will depend, quite frankly, upon your level of hurricane geekiness.  They aren’t for everyone.

 

As hurricane season ramps up, you can expect a fair amount of coverage in this blog as well. 

 

When a storm threatens a specific region of the coast, I’ll try to provide local resources that you can monitor including radio, TV, and emergency service scanner feeds.

 

In the meantime, now is the time to get your disaster preparations in order.  Here is some of the information provided by the National Hurricane Center on preparedness.

"Preventing the loss of life and minimizing the damage to property from hurricanes are responsibilities that are shared by all

."

Throughout this Web site, information has been provided regarding actions that you can take based on specific hurricane hazards. The most important thing that you can do is to be informed and prepared. Disaster prevention includes both being prepared as well as reducing damages (mitigation).

Disaster Prevention should include:

• Developing a Family Plan
• Creating a Disaster Supply Kit
• Having a Place to Go
• Securing your Home
• Having a Pet Plan

»» Read More

When Spring Has Violently Sprung

 

 

# 5476

 

 

Last week, when I was on the road to Missouri, a long-lived tornado crossed the state of Florida wreaking havoc and damaging hundreds of homes and businesses.

 

I was lucky.  I came home to find a large tree branch draped carelessly across my carport roof, and a window screen on my Florida room partially dislodged, but no other damage. 

 

Spring, for much of the nation, is tornado season.

 

March, April, May and June generally see the strongest, and most frequent tornadoes, but these violent windstorms can occur any time of the year - particularly in the south. 

 

 

All but a small part of the United States is vulnerable to these storms, but the strongest of these storms generally occur in an area we call Tornado Alley (below), which runs from middle Texas north though Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and South Dakota.

 

 

This is the area where you will generally find the largest and most powerful tornadoes; the F5 wedge type. 

 

Fortunately, much of the mid-west is sparsely populated, and so the number of tornado deaths that occur here are actually less than in other areas of the country.   

 

As you can see by the above graphic, severe weather reports for the first three months of 2011 are clustered mostly in the Southeastern states.   

 

This region, dubbed `Dixie Alley’ actually sees more tornado fatalities in an average year than the more famous `tornado alley’ due to its higher population density, even though the storms tend to be smaller (F1 to F3).

 

A look at severe weather reports for all of 2010 shows that practically every part of the country saw severe storms (tornado, wind, hail) last year.

Which means that everyone should already have an emergency plan in place, have a battery-operated weather radio, and be prepared to seek shelter immediately should conditions threaten.

 

 

Whether you are in the path of a storm, or merely fascinated by severe weather, the internet provides many ways to track severe storms. Today I thought I’d share a few of my favorites.

 

The first stop should always be NOAA’s  Storms Prediction Center, where multi-day outlooks of severe weather are constantly being updated.

 

Severe (non-tropical) weather is monitored daily by the Storms Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.  On their website you will find the current and forecasted areas of severe weather.

 

Potential for severe weather today (April 8th, 2011) as forecast by the Storms Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.

 

While today appears to relatively quiet, by Sunday the picture changes in the upper Midwest, where a moderate threat is forecast three days from now.  

 

 

A clickable U.S. map that will link you to the regional NOAA weather forecast offices can be found here, or by clicking the graphic below.

 

 

Another resource is NOAA WEATHER RADIO.

 

Once thought of as mainly a source of local weather information, it has now become an `All-Hazards' alert system as well.

 

In order to receive these broadcasts, you need a special receiver.  Many of these radios have a special `Tone Alert', and will begin playing once they receive a special alert signal from the broadcaster.

 

Like having an emergency kit, a first aid kit, and a portable AM/FM radio - having a weather radio is an important part of being prepared. 

 

Although not a substitute for having your own emergency weather radio, you can listen to NOAA weather radio alerts online, coming from most areas of the country.

 

 

When a tornado or severe storm warning has been issued, I will sometimes check to see if local TV stations in the threat area are broadcasting live on the Internet. Cities with a long history of severe storms often break into regular programming for with non-stop coverage. 

 

A Google Search will often provide you with several local TV stations that may be streaming video.   KFOR.COM in Oklahoma City usually goes live once tornado warnings are issued.  Other stations you might try in the OKC area are KOCO.COM  and KWTV.COM.

 

If streaming video is a bit too much for your internet connection, you might prefer to listen in to one of the hundreds of police/fire/EMS scanner feeds that are available online. 

 

RadioReference is just one of several online portals for scanner feeds, but is the one I tend to use.  Simply click on the maps to select the state, then county, that you wish to monitor.

 

 

But if your internet connection can handle it, you might find the live streaming video (and sometimes audio) from storm chasers in the field to be of interest.  Once again there are several options here. 

 

One of the biggest is Severe Studios, which often has more than a half dozen chasers streaming video simultaneously.

 

 

You may also wish to check out Storm Chaser TV, and often you’ll find Hurricane City’s live feed available on their site, or on USTREAM.

 

Of course, if you are in the path of the storm, you need to get off the Internet and down into your cellar or safe room.  Hopefully today’s threat will turn out to be less serious than the forecast indicates.

 

For more information on how to prepare for emergencies, including severe weather, the following sites should be of assistance.

 

FEMA http://www.fema.gov/index.shtm

READY.GOV http://www.ready.gov/

AMERICAN RED CROSS http://www.redcross.org/

 

When Hurricane season arrives, I’ll have some hurricane-centric links for you as well.

»» Read More

Ukraine And The Internet Rumor Mill

 

 

# 4010

 

 

A hat tip to Crof at Crofsblog for picking up this very informative piece in the New York Times that explains, in great detail, some of the challenges facing Ukraine’s medical system and how that greatly exacerbated their recent pandemic flu outbreak.

 

The author describes a health care system so dysfunctional (and at times corrupt) that many Ukrainians simply preferred to rely on home remedies like lemon and garlic, rather than seek help at a local hospital. 

 

By the time many influenza patients finally sought medical care, their condition had become critical.   

 

The sudden appearance of so many  pneumonia patients not only overwhelmed local hospitals, it also launched a maelstrom of Internet rumor and speculation.

 

By all means, read this article in its entirety.   There’s a lot of good information there, and it appears to be the most `reasonable’ explanation of what happened in Ukraine that I’ve seen so far.  

 

When you return, a few comments about Internet rumors and pandemic speculation.

 

Fragile Care Worsened Swine Flu in Ukraine

 

By ELLEN BARRY

Published: November 13, 2009

LVIV, Ukraine — When patients began arriving in Vyacheslav Bonder’s intensive care unit two weeks ago, their lungs so saturated with blood that they could barely gasp, the only thing he could compare it to was a field hospital in wartime. As soon as he hooked one patient up to a ventilator, a second and third would appear in the doorway.

 

By that time, hospitals were clearing wards to make room for a wave of pneumonia cases, and people were crowding into drugstores to buy whatever they could get their hands on. Rumors were circulating that the government had ordered the city aerially sprayed with chemicals, to cure Lviv (pronounced luh-VEEVE) of disease or, in a grimmer version, to exterminate its carriers.

 

The panic lifted almost as quickly as it had arrived, and the World Health Organization announced Friday that the swine flu illnesses and deaths so far in Ukraine — 265 fatalities nationwide, with 87 in the Lviv region — were statistically no worse than those in other countries. But what happened here has drawn rapt attention from experts bracing for the epidemic to hit Europe, and especially the fragile health care systems of countries of the former Soviet Union.

(Continue . . . )

 

Early this month reports of Ukrainian patients with `bloody lungs’ arriving at hospitals quickly spread quickly across the Internet. 

 

Within hours conspiracy blogs, twitter accounts, and even some newspaper reports eagerly began offering explanations that ranged from `Russian biological attacks’ and `possible mutated flu viruses’, to even outbreaks of `pneumonic plague’.  

 

Most were patently ridiculous on their face, although the possibility of a mutation in the  H1N1 virus that increased virulence was always a possibility. 

 

`Hemorrhagic viral pneumonia’, however, isn’t all that rare, and has already been documented with the pandemic virus.

 

The July 10, 2009 / 58(Dispatch);1-4  MMWR (Morbidity & Mortality Weekly Report) of the CDC  described several such cases observed in Michigan in: Intensive-Care Patients With Severe Novel Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infection --- Michigan, June 2009

 

On November 3rd, in Three Updates From The Ukraine, I wrote:

 

While all of this is obviously a concern, none of these reports gives any credence to the wild (and unsubstantiated) reports of `pneumonic plague’ or a Russian `bio-attack’, or of `thousands of deaths’ that have recently surfaced in some newspapers, and are spreading on the net . . .

. . . For now, however, there is no evidence of anything more ominous here than a large outbreak of pandemic H1N1 influenza, possibly along with a mix of other respiratory viruses common this time of year. 

 

Since then, I’ve received a number of emails and comments (some removed) that argued that the WHO was covering up the truth, and that by not printing these `allegations’, I was complicit in that cover up as well. 

 

After penning more than 4,000 essays on pandemic influenza and other emerging infectious diseases, it was a novel experience to be labeled a `pandemic denier’.

 

The frequency and tenor of some of these comments regrettably forced me to, after nearly 4 years, go to completely moderated comments on this site. 

 

The Internet loves a conspiracy, and if I wanted to quickly triple the number of daily visitors to this site, all I’d have to do is fabricate and print some of the conspiratorial cyber-crap that seems so prevalent these days. 

 

It would be easy enough to slip some Google Ads into my sidebar, start selling homeopathic `anti-flu pills’ or e-books with `insider flu information’ and maybe make a buck or two.

 

You can rest easy, that’s not going to happen. 

 

While it may not draw huge crowds to this site,  I find the science and `reality’ of this pandemic far more interesting than any conspiracy theories or speculation.  And I’m quite happy with the small, and largely erudite readership of this blog.

 

This is living history,  and it deserves sober and sane coverage.

 

You’ll find others striving to do the same in my sidebar links, and in my essay Reliable Sources In Flublogia.

 

While it is certainly  possible that one of these days one of the thousands of wild Internet rumors or stories will turn out to be true, I’d rather be a few days late reporting it, than to embrace the 99.99% that are false or misleading.

 

For those who might be disappointed with this policy, all I can do is suggest that a quick Google search will turn up scads of `alternative’ pandemic flu sites.

 

I’m sure that you’ll have no trouble finding a number of them more to your liking.

 

       ____________________________________________

 

UPDATED: 11/17/09    WHO : Ukraine Update # 2   

This latest dispatch from the World Health Organization states that no significant mutations have been detected in the virus samples taken in Ukraine.

»» Read More

GAO: Avoiding A Net Loss During A Pandemic

 

(UPDATED)

 

# 3898

 

This is something my good buddy, and fellow blogger, Scott McPherson has written about several times:

 

Whether the Internet will handle the load if millions of people are stuck at home during a pandemic.

Scott is the CIO of the Florida House of Representatives, and eminently qualified to opine on this issue.  But more on that in a bit. 

 

First, the GAO (Government Accountability Office) has just published a study, entitled:

 

Influenza Pandemic: Key Securities Market Participants Are Making Progress, but Agencies Could Do More to Address Potential Internet Congestion and Encourage Readiness

GAO-10-8 October 26, 2009

Highlights Page (PDF)  

Full Report (PDF, 77 pages)   

Recommendations (HTML)

 

 

I’ve reproduced excerpts from the summary below.  

 

Summary

Concerns exist that a more severe pandemic outbreak than 2009's could cause large numbers of people staying home to increase their Internet use and overwhelm Internet providers' network capacities. Such network congestion could prevent staff from broker-dealers and other securities market participants from teleworking during a pandemic.

 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is responsible for ensuring that critical telecommunications infrastructure is protected. GAO was asked to examine a pandemic's impact on Internet congestion and what actions can be and are being taken to address it, the adequacy of securities market organizations' pandemic plans, and the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) oversight of these efforts. GAO reviewed relevant studies, regulatory guidance and examinations, interviewed telecommunications providers and financial market participants, and analyzed pandemic plans for seven critical market organizations.

 

Increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers' access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors, according to a DHS study and providers.

 

(Continue . . . )

 

For those wishing a 1 page summary, download the Highlights Page (PDF).

 

 

For those who want to learn more, but are not masochistic enough to try to wade through 77 pages of a GAO report, you might consider reading Scott McPherson’s excellent 5-Part series on why Telecommuting Will Probably Fail In A Pandemic.

 

Why telecommuting will probably fail in a pandemic, Vol. 1

Why telecommuting will probably fail in a pandemic, Vol. 2

The ampersand that ate San Francisco; or, Why telecommuting will probably fail during a pandemic, Vol. 3

Why telecommuting will probably fail in a pandemic, Vol. 4

Why telecommuting will probably fail in a pandemic, Vol. 5

 

UPDATE:  No sooner did I post this blog when I discovered that Scott has written Vol. 6 to this series.  I fear the only way to stop him will be for his predictions about the net to come to pass.  

 

But I digress . . . read it while you can:

 

Why telecommuting will probably fail in a pandemic, Vol. 6: the GAO weighs in

»» Read More