NOAA hurricane tracker undergoes update

With four hurricanes occurring in the last two weeks, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Historical Hurricane Tracks tool has been flooded by users.

"The last six days in August, we had 52,430 unique visitors to the site—that's close to our total traffic during July and August of 2006 and 2007," says Jennifer Boulware, a program manager with Rockville, Maryland-based IM Systems Group who helped develop the application. The tracker, which launched in 2002 but was recently updated, allows you to quickly find out how many major storms have hit a particular location from 1851 through 2007; storms in the Eastern North Pacific are tracked for the last 60 years.

"We saw this great mass data sitting out there and we decided, 'Let's find a away to make it accessible to the general public,' " says Ethan Gibney, a senior geospatial analyst at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, and the lead programmer for the tracker. "The data is historical, but it can give you a insights into the pattern of tropical cyclone and hurricane climatology in your area."

Wanting to run the tracker through its paces, I decided to check out storm activity for Miami. That is, Miami, Florida; Miami, Oklahoma; and Miami University in Oxford Ohio. (From top to bottom, the images at right show storm activity in Florida, Oklahoma, and Ohio.)

The search for the fun-in-the-sun Miami yielded a map overlaid with a spaghetti-tangle of 353 storm tracks. These include two unnamed Category 5 storms that hit in 1935 and 1947, 28 Category 4 storm tracks (including Hurricane Donna in 1960 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992) and 32 Category 3 storms (the most recent were Hurricane King in 1950, Hurricane Isbell in 1964, and Hurricane Wilma in 2005).

While Miami, Oklahoma, hasn't seen the same activity as the Florida city, residents there aren't necessarily safe from storms. "It turns out that inland flooding is now the major cause of deaths from hurricanes," noted Gerry Bell, Ph.D., the NOAA's lead seasonal-hurricane forecaster, in an earlier blog entry on the updated Atlantic-storm forecast for 2008.

The storm tracker shows that from 1902 to 1921, three tropical storms came within 30 miles of this Oklahoma city. Unnamed tropical depressions also hit Miami in 1931 an 1955, others followed in the wakes of hurricanes Carla (1961), Candy (1968), Claudette (1979), and Gilbert (1988).

Moving north to Miami (University ), the RedHawks' hometown was hit by an unnamed tropical storm in 1892 and tropical depressions in 1896, 1901, 1915, and 1926. Tropical depressions also followed hurricanes Betsy (1965), Claudette and Bob (1979), Erin (1995) and the double-whammy of Dennis and Katrina (1995).

Don't be surprised it takes a while find your home's hurricane history—the site has proved so popular that it can slow to a near crawl at peak usage times.—Gian Trotta

Essential information: Our Storm & Emergency Guide includes printable checklists to help you prepare for and deal with storms and natural disasters. See our video on flood insurance.