NOAA Unveils ‘Storm Tracker’ to Follow Tropical Storms and Hurricanes

As the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season gets underway, NOAA today introduced a new way to follow specific tropical storms or hurricanes. Storm Tracker is designed to open a new and smaller browser window, which can be resized and placed anywhere on a computer desktop. NOAA Storm Tracker will contain live links to advisories, tracking maps and satellite images of a particular storm that is projected to strike the United States or other nations in a storm’s path.

NOAA Storm Tracker also will include links to data from ocean buoys, affected airports and the latest high resolution satellite imagery of a tropical storm or hurricane. The new browser window allows the user to continue surfing the Internet while keeping track of a storm. The live links in NOAA Storm Tracker will update automatically without having to “refresh” or “reload” the browser window.

NOAA Web sites were literally stormed by millions of people during the very intense 2004 hurricane season, which saw four hurricanes strike the state of Florida. The NOAA home page received 1.2 billion hits for all of 2004, with nearly half of that traffic in September alone. The Web sites of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service received more than 8 billion hits during the months of August, September and October—when the Atlantic spawned one storm after another.

“NOAA Web sites have proven to be enormously popular with citizens in the United States and worldwide,” said retired Navy Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Ph.D., under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “Saving life and protecting property is one of the primary missions of NOAA, and one way we communicate vital information is through our Web sites.”

NOAA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and providing environmental stewardship of the nation's coastal and marine resources.

On the Web:

NOAA: http://www.noaa.gov

NOAA Storm Tracker: http://www.stormtracker.noaa.gov