NOAA's Tracking Site Shows Historical Storm Activity

While, as the mutual fund ads always say, past performance is no guarantee of future performance, knowing your area's hurricane history can help you with your Disaster Recovery plan. NOAA's new historical hurricane tracking site displays hurricane and other major storm tracks for past 150 yearsWhile Murphy's Law tells us that if we make a perfect plan for a hurricane then fire, mudslide or some other disaster is sure to strike those organizations on the gulf and Atlantic coasts south of Cape Hatteras or so need to treat hurricanes as their major regional disaster threat. Seeing the history of major storms in your area, and their tracks, should help you figure out a safe place for your DR site if nothing else.

You can enter a city name or zip code and then filter the storm tracks to be displayed on the map by magnitude and/or year. It will then show the tracks color coded by storm intensity.

Just for grins I took a press release I got recently claiming the company issuing the release was fully protected against hurricanes with their primary data center in Miami and a backup site in Orlando and ran up a Florida map. Turns out no less than 5 storms in the system came through or near both cities at Hurricane force. If they had put that backup site in Atlanta they'd be in a city that's never seen a hurricane. Every storm that hit Atlanta in the past 150 years has faded to less than hurricane strength before reaching 65 miles of the city.

Take a look. You may learn something about your own DR plan you didn't want to know. The site is at http://maps.csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/.