Hurricane Isaac Mapped

Projected to make landfall tonight at the southwest pass of the Mississippi River, a recently reclassified Hurricane Isaac has a lot of residents of the Gulf Coast.  The hurricane is currently a category 1 with winds of 75 MPH.  The hurricane is expected to make landfall later today.

There are a multitude of resources for tracking the path of Hurricane Isaac and evacuation areas.  For government sources, visit the National Hurricane Center’s Hurricane Isaac page for a variety of maps and tables.  NOAAwatch.gov has Hurricane Isaac maps as well as satellite imagery.  NASA’s Earth Observatory has a stunning image capturing Hurricane Isaac taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite on August 23, 2012.

Interactive Maps of Hurricane Isaac

Listed here are a few of the offerings from the multitude of sites that provide live tracking of Hurricane Isaac as it approaches the Gulf of Mexico and hits landfall as a hurricane. These interactive sites show the path of the storm and indicate the changes in strength along the way as the storm develops from a tropical storm to a hurricane.  The sites also show the project path and strength of the hurricane once it makes landfall.

Esri has an online map with storm related overlays (storm surge, active hurricanes, past hurricanes, weather warnings, and precipitation levels) along with social media content from YouTube, Twitter, and Flickr.

The NY Times has a Hurricane Isaac Tracking map that pulls data from the National Weather Service to track the current location, path and strength categories to date, and the project path of the hurricane.  Hover the mouse over each point for a window with quick statistics about wind speed forecast, time estimate, and category type.

Googles’ Crisis Response center has a consolidated map for Hurricane Isaac.  Data is pulled from NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, FEMA, the American Red Cross, NYC Datamine, and the Navy Research Lab.  Each data source has a link to download the associated KML file.

Hurricane Isaac Satellite Imagery

The European Space Agency’s Proba-2 microsatellite captured Tropical Storm Isaac on August 27, 2012 west of the Florida coast as it moved toward the Gulf Coast.  The microsatellite’s experimental X-Cam (Exploration Camera) is about the size of an expresso cup.  Proba-2’s main mission is collecting data about the Sun and space weather.