Over the last week you can't have failed to notice that Hurricane Dean has passed across Jamaica and Mexico, causing a lot of damage. Whilst we in the UK get coverage of this on the news, and the odd quick bit at the start of a weather forecast, I like to have more information about these amazing but devastating storm systems. Luckily for me the web is full of real time information about Hurricanes, so I thought I'd share what I've found with you.

First off is the obvious one, America's National Hurricane Center, which is full of information. This also leads off nicely to the NESDIS website, which provides satellite imagery of the Hurricane areas and the USA. Of particular interest on this website are the images provided by the GOES satellites.

Moving away from the official websites I found this website, flhurricane.com, which is run by “weather hobbyists” and contains an absolute wealth of information. Of particular interest to me were the mashups with Google Maps of Hurricane track data (where they went) for particular years. They have data stretching back for every year to 1902! You can view an individual Hurricane, like the recent Hurricane Dean, or now infamous Hurricane Katrina, or you can see all Hurricanes for a particular year. This I like, take 2005 for example, there were some 32 Hurricanes / tropical storms, criss-crossing all over the place that year, incredible.

So there you have it, I hope this nugget of Hurricane related website goodness has whetted your appetite, so the next time you hear about a Hurricane on the news don't just take their word and pictures for it, get on the web and find out a bit more!