8.29 – Ernesto’s a wimp. That’s my prediction; but you can’t be too safe. Last year, Wilma looked to be a wimp before landfall. All of us who underestimated Wilma got quite the surprise. Wilma, South Florida’s end-of-season Catagory 01 hurricane, clobbered all but 119 of Miami-Dade’s 2,200 traffic signals snarling traffic for weeks and pounded Florida Power and Light’s utility poles blinding residents at nightfall for weeks.

Many of us depend heavily on The Weather Channel for updates during these times. The truth is that all the information they use to predict and advise is available for us to assimilate ourselves. Do-It-Yourself weather during an emergency isn’t highly recommended, but here’s what you can find no matter when in the world you are in case TWC and Governor Jeb Bush aren’t handy enough to tune-in on the television.

Terrapins up in Maryland University present dry data (though not nearly as dry as Weather.Unisys.com including advisories for Tropical Storms and Hurricanes. Their JAVA tracker maps are merely interesting and forecast nothing; they only track the history of a storm. So we’ll need something more dynamic.

Weather Underground :: Tropical has a peculiar likeness to TWC’s site. Hurricanes get mapped, plotted, animated and stuck on the front page instantly. Just so you know, the ONLY Weather Toolbar we don’t recommend against is the one from TWC’s site.

The clever chasers at HurricaneTrack.com might actually be a little insane. Their motto is that we, the visitors, track it, and they’ll take us there. The poster at left is available in their store and, frankly typing, we must say that it’s a beauty of a poster. no proceeds of the sales go to us at all, but what a looker this look back at last year’s record breaking storms is! Video reports and a blog-style kindness to the site make it pretty fun to visit. Unfortunately, we can’t recommend many of the other sites that are refered to in the margins, but that’s life. Their access to live webcams is pretty interesting however. Now, how about some RSS so that the news comes to us instead?

The National Hurricane Center will let you pick a storm and XML stories about it to yourself which simplifies a great deal of research and effort. What happens when the storm is gone? Although it’s not RSS able, Weather.gov’s country map is a neat catch-all of everything going on. Clicking on a region will zoom in for more detailed maps and alerts.

Collegiate papers on hurricanes and predictions may benefit from the following, otherwise dull, links: FSU probability study, The Atlantic Tropical Weather Center crammed to the hilt with links, those B&W maps everyone uses are born at GOES.NOAA.gov, get the NAVY’s take, historical archive compliments of Weather.Unisys.com,Weathermatrix’s huge mess of trackers and posts and pics and vids.