Hurricane

Developer: Kitty Code
Category: Weather
Version: 3.1
Release Date: August 4, 2009
Size: 2.0 MB
Price: $3.99
Rating: 9/10

It's now mid-August and Hurricane season is well under way. This week also marks the 4th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of the Lower 9th Ward in N.O.LAS. Two storms have blown through the Caribbean already, Ana and Bill, a third, Claudette, spun a path all the way up to Nova Scotia producing heavy rains and big surf up and down the East Coast, and now the North East is drying out after the remains of Tropical Storm Danny.

It's big news when the storm season hits the South and the East Coast, and suddenly all eyes are on the West Coast of Africa, where tropical storms spin one after another out into the Atlantic, ambling towards the Caribbean with steadily intensifying power. The intensity and destruction of even a near miss is impressive. That's why people on the East Coast pay such close attention to the storms and their development. The first two hurricane seasons that the iPhone was in existence we had The Weather Channel app and the generic Weather app to keep us posted. Now, on round three, a few hurricane specific apps have popped up, the best being Hurricane.

Hurricane from Kitty Code gives all the information that you need to know about impending storms, starting with radar imagery of the West Coast of Africa where great big swirls of red and yellow are constantly emerging from. The first screen of the app lists each storm, the top of the list is active storms, the bottom of the list is completed storms. By selecting a storm you can view the following data: Tracking Maps, Radar, Satellite View, Text Bulletins and forecast paths. You can view 8 satellite loops, all that you could possibly need. There is a great Tropical Weather Outlook satellite view also which pegs barometric depression areas. The Tracking map gives great info on the storms, touch any dot along the route and it tells you the wind velocity and barometric pressure at that point in time. To sum it up, the live storm data feed is as complete as it gets for a civilian weather report. You can get a minute by minute update on any storm rated Tropical Depression to full on named Hurricane. The tracking system offers data out into the Pacific as well, tracking the storms that spin through Central and South America and end up heading towards Hawaii and the South Pacific Islands. I'd like the app to offer is a tracking map of all the storms of the season on one screen, and some camera feeds would be very cool, especially some of the lighthouse web-cams that are up and down the East Coast.

This app goes above and beyond the call of duty and really appeals to any storm buff by offering a data base of all historical storms going back to when data was first collected, all the way back to 1851. You can study storms like the 1938 storm which absolutely pummeled the East Coast, ravaging the North East in particular and leading to the rise of modern day Hurricane prediction and evacuation techniques. There are hundreds of storms listed, and you can see how the data accumulation process has evolved over the last century and a half.

There are a few other apps in the App Store that are Hurricane specific, and there are always the all-arounders like Weather Bug and Weather Channel, but for pure Hurricane data Hurricane can't be beat. Weather apps tend to be a little more pricey than others, but think of the work that needs to be done to collect all that data and display it in a way that the layman can understand. To call $3.99 pricey is going out on a limb though. When the power is out and the phone lines are down, the 3G network can deliver you better Hurricane information than has ever been available to the public before. It's Hurricane Season, buy Hurricane if you want to be in the know.