May/June 2006At Your Fingertips: Info for Weather Watches, Hurricane Preparednessby Marc Rapport
OK, fire up your Web browser, open up Google and type in "hurricane." You get 47 million or so results. Narrow it to "hurricane safety tips" and only about 19 million choices are offered. "Hurricanes South Carolina"? A mere 1.9 million.
You get the picture. Information about hurricanes is about as easy to find as the big storms themselves in these days of high technology and information overload.
The state Emergency Management Division publishes its annual hurricane guide each June and distributes it in newspapers from Columbia to the coast. It includes survival kit information, preparedness guidelines, phone numbers, Web sites, shelter information and a tracking map, so it's worth keeping an eye out for.
To make it a bit easier, below are some Web sites that provide a good place to start keeping an eye on the tropical skies.
- State Climate Office
- S.C. Emergency Management Division
- Federal Emergency Management Agency
- National Hurricane Center/Tropical Prediction Center
- National Flood Insurance Program
- Southeast Regional Climate Center
- National Climatic Data Center
- The Weather Underground's tropical pages, with commentary from well-known hurricane hunters and other experts
- Intellicast, another commercial weather service; particularly good radars
- The Weather Channel
