[September 09, 2011] Web-based tool puts storm history in perspective Tweet Sep 09, 2011 (The Reporter - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- A federal agency has updated its hurricane history site to make it easier for people to get an view of every tropical cyclone anywhere in the world over the past 168 years. The Historical Hurricane Tracks site, developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coastal Services Center, is a search tool and hurricane track viewer. It taps a database of tropical systems from 1842 through last season, and can display location, wind speed and other information and draw the track of any tropical cyclone, from tropical depressions to tropical storms and hurricanes, a total of more than 6,000 systems. The CSC plans to add the most recent season's storms each year, David Eslinger, Oceanographer and project manager at CSC, said Thursday. The Historical Hurricane Tracks website is csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes. According to Donna McCaskill, a public information official at CSC, a record number of people visited the site during Hurricane Irene's run through the Caribbean, Bahamas and U.S. East Coast. Eslinger, who earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from Florida State University, said the site had 19,000 unique visitors on its busiest day, Friday, Aug. 26. The website has a search panel on the left and a map on the right. The search panel lets users select storms by name, year or location, and set other options. The map shows the tracks of the storms found in the database, and you can easily zoom and pan the view, from as wide as the ocean to as close as your street. The viewer improvements include high-resolution map images. Eslinger said the major change is including global storm data from the NOAA National Climate Data Center. Storms on your street One way to look at storms is by picking a location and setting a range. For example, you can click on Tavernier and type 50 for the "search area" in miles. That shows every tropical system that haspassed within 50 miles of Tavernier on the map. For any place in the Florida Keys, the results aren't pretty. A 50-mile circle around Tavernier shows 61 tropical cyclones, from an unnamed tropical storm in 1863 to Tropical Storm Bonnie in 2010. The list includes hurricanes Ernesto (2006), Katrina (2005), Irene (1999), Andrew (1992), Floyd (1987), Dennis (1981), Dawn (1972), Brenda (1968), Inez (1966), and many more. Few were direct hits, of course, but their paths were inside the 50-mile radius. After doing a search, rolling the mouse over the list of storms highlights the individual tracks on the map. Clicking on any storm shows its full history in the search panel. Clicking Inez, for example, shows a summary of the 80 advisories for the storm, which reached Category 4 strength at 2 a.m. EDT on Sept. 28. On the map, each advisory corresponds to a dot on the track. Clicking the dot closest to Tavernier shows that Izez passed between Tavernier Key and the south end of Key Largo, coming from the northeast at 2 p.m. on Oct. 4, and went on to cross U.S. 1 by the Indian Waterways subdivision on Plantation Key. One thing the track map shows is that Inez was kind to the Florida Keys. The storm was a Category 4 hurricane in the Caribbean, weakened while crossing Cuba, went southwest the entire length of the Keys at Category 1 and then quickly regained strength back to Category 4 in the Gulf of Mexico before making landfall Oct. 10 near Tampico, Mexico. While viewing storm tracks and information, you can switch back and forth from individual storms to all the systems that match a search. You can save a set of storms by clicking the plus signs in the Search Results list. By clicking the Storm Report link above the advisories table, you get the official Tropical Cyclone report -- a post-storm analysis by the National Hurricane Center -- for any storm that has one. The hurricane season hits a peak around mid-September. If you draw a 100 mile circle around the Middle Keys, taking in everything from Miami to the Dry Tortugas, the Historical Hurricane Track site shows the area has seen 34 storms or hurricanes since 1842 in the month of September, and 10 of those were major hurricanes, Category 3 or higher. But what's interesting, as shown by the storm database, is that for the Florida Keys, the numbers are exactly the same for the month of October. ___ (c)2011 The Reporter (Tavernier, Fla.) Visit The Reporter (Tavernier, Fla.) at www.keysnet.com Distributed by MCT Information Services [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]