Hurricane Visualizations
Compiled by Jen Millner at Montana State University and John McDaris at SERC.
Find satellite images and visualizations that illustrate how these violent weather systems form and function, as well as their effects on the natural and human landscapes. There are links about the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina, other past hurricanes, and visualizations of model and hypothetical hurricanes used in research. We have also collected some links to other types of materials related to hurricanes.
Click here to browse the complete set of Visualization Collections.
2005 Hurricane Season
This site has links to pages of information and data on all the storms of the 2005 Hurricane Season. Storm activity reported on National Hurricane Center advisories has been overlaid onto Google Maps of the Atlantic and Carribean regions. Previous years' storm seasons are also available.
This software company has produced several visualizations of the impacts of Rita and Katrina that are available for download on their website. You can also find more information on the tool that was used to create the visualizations.
Hurricane Wilma - October, 2005
This page from the National Hurricane Center hosts a variety of still graphics that can be looped into animations of the storm's progress. Images include 3- and 5-day Watches and Warnings, Wind Swaths and Strike Probabilities.
Hurricane Rita - September, 2005
This page from the National Hurricane Center hosts a variety of still graphics that can be looped into animations of the storm's progress. Images include 3- and 5-day Watches and Warnings, Wind Swaths and Strike Probabilities.
Hurricane Katrina - August, 2005
This collection of before and after aerial photos was put together by MSNBC to illustrate the changes in the urban landscape wroght by Hurricane Katrina. The photos are all of New Orleans. The interface allows users to either enter an address to view photos in the area or to pan and zoom through an interactive photo of the whole area.
This USGS page is part of that organization's response to the disaster along the Gulf Coast of the US. The Chandeleur Islands are a north-south oriented chain of low-lying islands located approximately 100 kilometers east of the city of New Orleans. The page shows five pairs of before and after images from different parts of the chain showing the damage caused by Katrina.
This page from NOAA's National Geodetic Survey provides access to high resolution satellite images of the aftermath of Katrina's passage through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Users click on the Index Map and select which area they would like to see.
This page provides access to a good number of satellite images of Hurricane Katrina taken by polar orbiting and geostationary satellites operated by NOAA. High resolution images are available on the site.
Weather Matrix: Atlantic Tropical Season 2005 - Katrina
This page from Weather Matrix provides a collection of links to imagery and text for Katrina from a variety of sources.
This page from the National Hurricane Center hosts a variety of still graphics that can be looped into animations of the storm's progress. Images include 3- and 5-day Watches and Warnings, Wind Swaths and Strike Probabilities.
This flash animation from the New Orleans Times-Picayune shows a time-sequenced animated map of New Orleans that displays levee breaks and flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina's storm surge.
Historic Hurricanes
NHC/TPC Archive of Past Hurricane Seasons (more info)
This archive at the National Hurricane Center hosts over a century's worth of seasonal hurricane track maps for the Atlantic and Pacific basins as well as a decade of text advisories and graphic images and monthly activity summaries. There are also links to "infamous" storms and frequently requested hurricane information.
This page has been developed by R. Hays Cummins, a tropical ecologist and science educator at Miami University of Ohio. This page boasts an extensive list of movies and images from seasons up to and including 2004. There is even a quicktime movie clip of video footage shot by Thomas Edison in the aftermath of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900!
This tool was developed by B.H. Bossak and J.B. Elsner at the Hurricane Climate Institute at Florida State University. Using documentary sources from the early 1800s, they built a GIS tool for tracking hurricanes that hit North America between 1800 and 1850. The link goes to a Web version of the tool which is view only. There is a customizable version of the tool that is available by contacting the Hurricane Climate Center.
This page from the GFDL (a government laboratory funded by NOAA) contains a good number of still images from computer models of several different hurricanes, including Andrew, Opal and Fran. Each image is accompanied by a description of what the image is trying to convey.
This flash animation was developed at CNN and shows the life cycle of all of the storms that occurred during the 2004 Hurricane Season. The strom tracks and severity of each storm is laid out on a map of the Atlantic Ocean, the Carribean and North America.
This animation shows footage from the GOES 8 satellite as hurricane Dennis approaches the coast of Florida on August 28, 1999. Watch the storm develop and increase in size and force as it approaches landfall. Arrows point to the eye and the eye wall of the storm, as well as peripheral feeder bands. Controls allow the viewer to stop and start the animation and watch it forwards, backwards, and in slow motion.
This database of images from the National Climatic Data Center has an extensive collection of still images from hurricanes and significant storms that have affected the United States since the 1970s. Users can search the database for images to view or download and can order hardcopy matte or glossy finish prints from the NCDC.
This collection of photo galleries from the NOAA Hurricane Research Division of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory contains images of storms and the aircraft that HRD uses to flying into the storms to gather data. There are also quicktime format video clips taken during flythoughs of the hurricanes that were studied.
Reconstructions and Visualizations of Model Hurricanes
This flash animation on the Associated Press website shows the typical damage done by each of the five levels of hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale. It shows the combined effect of the winds and the storm surge on buildings and trees in the hurricane's path.
This gallery contains Quicktime-format video clips of models, reconstructions and satellite imagery from major hurricanes since 1998. There are also some video clips about the science of hurricanes.
This NASA page is a clearinghouse of information on NASA's research into hurricane activity. The page provides links to news releases and articles on current hurricane activity as well as some good flash animation segments that visualize how hurricanes work (The Birth of a Hurricane and Looking at Hurricanes).
This CNN website allows visitors to navigate inside a virtual hurricane via a VRML (virtual reality modeling language) simulation. Viewing the simulation requires users to download a VRML plugin for their browser (find links to VRML plugins at this nist.gov site.)
This flash animation from CNN.com gives an overview of how hurricanes form, what areas of North America are most at risk for hurricane activity, safety tips for people in the path of a hurricane, a glossary of hurricane related terms and a list of the top 10 deadliest hurricanes in US history.
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