For Florida residents, our hurricane tracking service is a vital tool that shows how Web programming can also be excellent journalism.
A team of reporters contacted Florida’s 67 counties and used public records requests to obtain the property tax roles. Now about 8 million buildings, almost every one in state, is in the database. If a hurricane’s path points to land, IBISEYE.com calculates the number of buildings at risk based on whether it is inside a forecast or actual hurricane or tropical storm wind field. As a hurricane approaches, it puts the danger in perspective.
During the 2006 hurricane season, IBISEYE drew more than 80,000 visits.
The IBISEYE database became the foundation for a Herald-Tribune investigation of hurricane paths. Though nowhere along the southern U.S. coastline is safe from hurricanes, there are hurricane hot spots -- areas that are far more likely to be struck than others -- according to a Herald-Tribune analysis of all known hurricanes since 1851.
The busiest and largest hot spot is a 300-mile swath of the South Florida coastline from Key West to St. Lucie County. It is centered on Miami Beach, which has been struck an average of once every 4 1/2 years -- five times the average for coastal counties.
The analysis required performing about 45 million calculations that examined 13,400 storm segments dating back to 1851 and calculating each segment’s distance to 1,227 coastal places. All the geometry was programmed and run on a SQL Server. All the information was stored in a database and tied to each storm so the storms could be listed and then mapped under the name of each place.
Once the data was created, we used the Google Map hacks to overlay the update points and path lines onto the map.
The hot spots were determined by taking the average number of storms that stuck places in each coastal county. The counties in the top third were considered high; and the bottom two thirds either moderate or low. These maps were created using ArcGIS, a mapping application, and then converted to KML, the native format used by Google Earth. We then developed a technique to use those files to overlay the thematically colored counties.
The "we" referred to there are Maurice Tamman and Charlie Szymanski. Everything written above is a compilation of several nomination letters and samples quite liberally from their own words, not mine.
