Monday, May 07, 2007

Super Weather


On May 15th the Eastern Pacific Hurricane season begins. Two weeks after that, on June 1st, the Atlantic season kicks into gear.

I don't know about you but one of the big things I took away from 9/11 was that ignorance was not bliss. No matter how deep I'd bury my head in the ground the reality of living in the 21st century and it's immediacy of information transmittal made the excuse of stupidity totally ineffective.

When Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed New Orleans two years ago the images and the feeling of living the 9/11 ignorance-is-not-bliss feeling again shook me to the core. ... Again ... Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice ... well ... shame on me again.

After 9/11 I learned much about Islam. I learned much that was good and much that I still consider bad. After Katrina I learned much about hurricanes and now each year, from the middle of May till early November I subscribe to the Eastern Pacific and Atlantic e-mail advisories from the National Hurricane Center, a subset of the wealth of weather information sharply presented by NOAA - the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

Hurricanes begin their life at the equator over Africa and head east across the Atlantic. Thanks to these two sites you can watch hurricanes pop into existence and then, like last year thankfully, head north into the middle of the Atlantic and spiral into obscurity. Or ....

If you consider yourself a weather geek and prefer having your head above the sand rather than in it these two sites and the e-mail newsletters are a great way to get real information weeks before CNN even considers it a news worthly footnote. A word of caution though - if a big one is in progress expect 5 to 10 e-mails a day.

This picture, while anything but a hurricane, I just love as a weather nut. It was taken last Thursday, May the 3rd of English Bay Vancouver looking north just after 6:00 PM. It's a slice of pacific weather in action as cool, moist air from northern British Columbia and Alaska rolled on top of the warm Californian winds that we'd been basking in for several days. Needless to say there was much rain to follow. The good news though was that I didn't have to punch anyone for saying how good a day it was if I was a duck. :)

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