Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Typhoon Information

Every summer, there will be typhoon coming to Hong Kong and even if they are not coming exactly to this small place, they are going to affect us quite a lot. For examples, if you got kids at home, you will want to know whether they will need to go to school or not, and there could be sudden holiday if the typhoon comes close enough.

Therefore, it's always nice to know more in advance. The first page that I am going to introduce is, of course, the official one:

http://www.hko.gov.hk

There is a page inside which tells the latest (predicted) track:

http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/currwx/tc_pos.htm

The official website tends to be conservative, and there is another unofficial one here:

http://www.hkcoc.com/observatoryhome.htm

And when there is typhoon coming close enough, you can find various tracks as predicts by different observatories and therefore, it is very useful. What is even more interesting is that, they will show the chance of having different typhoon signals within certain time frames (like within 24 hours, 28 hours, etc). Of course, there is no guarantee on the accuracy of the predictions, but from my experience, they're pretty great indeed!!!

Actually, the above two are great enough, but let me introduce the third one:

http://metocph.nmci.navy.mil/jtwc.php

And it tells when it's just a tropical depression and when it is very far away.