Thanks to this helpful post on TechCrunch, I'm now aware of this helpful map on Google for tracking the progress of Hurricane Sandy:
http://google.org/crisismap/sandy-2012
It's a little overwhelming when you first look at it, because all the options for things you can see are "turned on" by default. But you can turn them off or on as you like by clicking on the checkboxes on the right-hand panel.
The "3-day forecast cone" shows Sandy's path as just missing Staten Island's southern tip. But I'm not banking on dry weather this week here in Jersey City.
Our local weather aside, it was cool to learn that Google has a whole program dedicated to doing this sort of thing whenever there's a weather emergency of sufficient size. The program is called "Google Crisis Response", and is part of their philanthropic arm, which is known as Google.org. You can read more about it on the FAQ here:
http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/faq.html
The concept sounds great to me, though I think the website could do a better job of showing what they're doing now. You have to hunt quite a bit to find their own post about their Sandy-tracker. The website looks more like a brochure advertising something that's still under development, when in actuality this is a project that has evidently been in operation since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
http://google.org/crisismap/sandy-2012
It's a little overwhelming when you first look at it, because all the options for things you can see are "turned on" by default. But you can turn them off or on as you like by clicking on the checkboxes on the right-hand panel.
The "3-day forecast cone" shows Sandy's path as just missing Staten Island's southern tip. But I'm not banking on dry weather this week here in Jersey City.
Our local weather aside, it was cool to learn that Google has a whole program dedicated to doing this sort of thing whenever there's a weather emergency of sufficient size. The program is called "Google Crisis Response", and is part of their philanthropic arm, which is known as Google.org. You can read more about it on the FAQ here:
http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/faq.html
The concept sounds great to me, though I think the website could do a better job of showing what they're doing now. You have to hunt quite a bit to find their own post about their Sandy-tracker. The website looks more like a brochure advertising something that's still under development, when in actuality this is a project that has evidently been in operation since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
thanks for sharing brad - this tool is pretty cool! totally agree about the branding piece though.
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