The South Florida Sun-Sentinel has a fantastic interactive storm tracking map on its site, Sun-Sentinel.com. This interactive map automatically plots the path and location of active storms and gives wind speeds. Click on the “Storm Archive” and you can see the path of any storm since 1900. You can use the arrow keys to move foward or backward through a storm’s path, seeing the wind speed and coordinates along the way.
For something on the lighter side, try Sun-Sentinel.com’s Hurricane Maker. Enter a name for the hurricane, drag it onto the map, set wind speed and humidity and, voila, you’ve got storm. This helps you “appreciate the many factors that go into building a storm.”
Both are built using Macromedia’s Shockwave.
If you like what you see, you can learn how to do great work like this from the brain’s behind Sun-Sentinel.com’s great interactives at a special Multimedia Storytelling Workshop at November’s Online News Association conference. Here’s more information and how to sign up.
