Tropical Storm ONE is ready to deliver 10-20 inches of rain to western Cuba. It probably will become Tropical Storm Alberto later today or tomorrow. Anyone want to guess how many named storms we'll have this year after last year's record 27?
Today marks the end of the 2005 hurricane season. Starting tomorrow any storms will go unnamed until the 2006 storm season starts June 1st. We've had a record 26 named storms. Before this year I had no idea what happened when we ran through the list of 21 Atlantic storm names -- we'd never done it before. As we all know now, after the people names, storms are named by letters of the Greek alphabet. Tropical Storm Epsilon is currently 1045 KM east-southeast of Bermuda with 70 mph winds. It's a good thing the season is ending. No one I've talked [...]
There's something disquieting in the thought that God/Mother Nature/The Cosmic Muffin is merely preparing for a formal release of a real hurricane season. I don't think that beta testing is really necessary — tropical storm formation and devastation seem to be perfected.
A true relation of my weather-worried grandmother, I am still scarfing up information on hurricanes. I find the carnival-like, "Oh Boy, it's going to be a disaster!" commentary on television distasteful. But, I also find myself surfing for details. Some favorite factiods: The list of hurricane names is posted at on a government NASA page. If the Internet can be believed, there are six lists of names, each used for a complete hurricane season. No "Q", "U", "X", "Y" and "Z" names appear. Terrapin Associates has a hurricane archive which allows you to search by storm name or location back into [...]
If only my grandmother were still alive! She'd been in nervous-weather heaven this hurricane season. Although she lived just south of Boston in not exactly prime hurricane territory, she tracked every storm and was sure that each was going to make straight for Massachusetts and do us in. At the start of the hurricane season, she'd mail into WBZ to get weatherman Don Kent's special hurricane tracking map. She'd mark every tropical depression/storm/hurricane's position using the latitude and longitude thoughtfully broadcast by Mr. Kent and his cohorts. Sure, it might look like a storm was going to peter out over [...]
My friend Mike's sister is trying to sell his house in San Francisco while packing her things and preparing to evacuate to higher ground if Rita hits her Galveston home. She expects that her neighborhood will be five feet under water if Rita gets there. Ugly. The best tracking pages I've found are at the National Hurricane Center.