While we are waiting for Ryan Maue’s ACE 2010 report on the hurricane season, there’s this from the Google Earth blog:

Greg at Geodesic contacted us to let us know about a very cool animation that his company has built which provides a great visualization of the 2010 Hurricane Season. Based on the NOAA tropical cyclone track data, this file does a great job of showing all of the hurricanes in 2010.

The file is rather large (9.35MB), but includes fantastic imagery of the various stages of each storm. For example, here is a great image of Hurricane Danielle as it was heading toward Bermuda:

You can read more about this project on their site. To see it for yourself, you can use this KMZ file or watch the video below:

[Update by Willis Eschenbach] Without Anthony’s permission but hopefully with his retroactive blessing I am adding this image from the Google Earth File:

All hurricanes, 2010, from the KMZ file cited above.

The surprising thing to me was the uniformity of the coverage. It looks like someone set out to sweep the entire area with the hurricane broom.

It emphasises the “heat-seeking” nature of hurricanes and thunderstorms. Both of them move preferentially to the warmest area in their path. There, they remove heat from the ocean and transport it to the upper troposphere. Subsequent hurricanes or thunderstorms tend to avoid the areas that have already been cooled.

Kudos to Craig for the Google Earth animation.

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