Tracking the storm
Finally. The people who work at the Canadian Hurricane Centre have something to do. Imagine being the Maytag Man in your department. A nice sign over your desk, some appropriate letterhead in the printer and a website, but nothing ever happens. Hard to keep the respect of the others in the office.
Thanks to all the content just waiting to be checked out on the web, there’s no shortage of webcams and up-to-date forecasts for the post-tropical storm now working its way northward over Halifax harbour and Pictou harbour and Charlottetown harbour and eventually Covehead harbour. Boats have been hauled up, just in case. Lawn furniture has been tied down. All there’s left to do now is wait things out.
Apart from the weather updates available thanks to our federal tax dollars, there are webcams galore. I’ve had a look at a few from Halifax, the feed provided at ruk.ca, the webcam at UPEI, and all have the same content to offer: rainstreaks. Let’s agree that the webcam doesn’t do justice to a post-tropical storm in the dark. You have to be there, on the shore, delighting in what the CBC’s Stephen Puddicombe described as “”It feels like little nails biting on your face”. The web just doesn’t deliver that, yet. Wait until Web 2.01 is available.
It’s funny. When I was younger, hurricanes happened outside the Canadian context, except for Hazel back in ’54 (the last century, for the younger members in the audience). We had storms, but hurricanes were saved for those in southern climes. Except that now we have access to much better data than before; you can actually check out the storm tracks for the last century or so, and have them plotted on a map. Here’s a link. Turns out that storms have been coming north for a long time.
Sometime tomorrow, after I finish resetting all the clocks, I’ll be able to catch up on how the last gasps of Hurricane Noel have played out.
