In our house, when the threat of a hurricane appears, the first thing we do is call our friend Mike France, a screenwriter ("The Fantastic Four," "Hulk," "The Punisher").
Mike's a great source for two reasons: He survived a hurricane and he's a skilled Web surfer.
In 1992, he rode out Hurricane Andrew huddled in his sister's solid concrete Miami condo after joining a mass evacuation from Key West, an exodus the speed, he recalls, of "a slow-moving train."
The day after Andrew (then the most destructive hurricane in U.S. history) passed, Mike went outside. There were boats everywhere but where they should have been, he recalls: "boats in second-story windows, boat in roofs."
In 1994, he moved his family to a beachfront house on the Gulf of Mexico. He began to discover Web sites that were more up to date than local media. For many,
The Weather Channel is the gold standard of information and predictions.
The other day, I asked Mike to share his favorite sites and explain why he prefers them to traditional sources.
Here's what he had to say:
There are lots of them. Many of them go dark after about a year. This one is my favorite [
Central Florida Hurricane Center 2007].
It focuses on central Florida, though it covers pretty much any storm that's going in the southeast. They won my allegiance when they correctly called that one of the 2004 storms,
Jeanne would
come toward us (this is the one I called you about and said, "Hey, buy some ice").
Check out the
message board. There are always some people who say, "It's coming for me! It's coming for me!" even when there's zero chance of that. But there are an astounding number of people who have a good grasp of science. If you want detail about where a storm might go and why, this is the place. You can get far more information here in 10 minutes than you could with a local weather forecast.
The links on the main page for satellite models are also great. You can spend hours looking at different university opinions on whether we get hit or Pensacola does! It really beats looking at the endless loop of the same information on The Weather Channel. You feel like the in-the-know ahead of the curve scientist in a disaster movie, rather than one of the drowning extras.
Golden Triangle Weather Page --They are a great one-stop, visual page, with constant updates of satellite images all in one place.
Tracking the Eye -- a good tracking map that allows you to download current track information and view it on your own map
So why does Mike do his own reporting instead of relying on mainstream media?
He said:
All of this seems important to me because the excess of information -- some of it hard fact, some very informed opinion (university models), some of it a mix of informed opinion and instinct and simply lousy guesses (the forums) -- helps me to make up my mind about whether I will prepare to evacuate or not. These sites keep me well ahead of the local news forecasts (not to mention The Weather Channel, which has information that is so generalized as to be useless as to forecast path).
Are there specialized hurricane-tracking sites that you rely on?
The best, unbiased hurricane information can be gleaned from the...
