Watching weather
TROPICAL storm Filipo slammed into the eastern parts of southern Africa this week. The storm left four people dead in Mozambique. Closer to home, the Lubombo Region in Eswatini was hard hit by rain and localised flooding. In South Africa, northern Kwazulu-Natal saw severe flooding and many roads were washed away in the area around Jozini near the border with Eswatini
Filipo had moved off back into the Indian Ocean at time of writing, and was not predicted to pass back over land again.
In following the progress of the storm I came across a great website- https://zoom. earth/. It shows near real time satellite imagery. The images are updated every 10 minutes with a half-hour delay. Users have the option to display high definition satellite pictures.
The website also allows you to set the clock back several days or weeks, then press play and watch how the satellite imagery progresses in the form of a video.
It’s simple and easy to use. You can set the map to show rain, wind, temperature, humidity, or pressure. Zoom dot earth also allows you to look at wildfires and smoke in the atmosphere. For all of this data you can watch how the rain or wind has swept over the land over the time span that you choose.
The website also you allows users to speed up these animations or slow them down. Imagery from different time intervals can be set, in other words if you only want to see the satellite or rain map at three-hour intervals, you can do that.
I like that it allows one to look at historical data. Want to know if it was last Tuesday that it rained so hard? This site can tell you.
One of my most favourite features of zoom dot earth is that it contains satellite maps going back to the year 2000. With this in mind, I wanted to know how common it was to have a tropical storm like Filipo in our area of the world on March 13.
I was able to look at the weather over the Mozambican channel on each March the 13th for the past 25 years. On six of the 25 maps there was a tropical storm between Madagascar and Mozambique. As it turned out, four of these six were in the past six years. Some might call this evidence of climate change, and I would agree.
One final feature of zoom dot earth that makes it useful to me is the ability to measure distances and areas.
Given the really simple-touse interface and easy-to-understand navigation, do check it out if you have any interest in monitoring weather conditions.
I find that looking at satellite maps gives me a much better understanding of what the weather will be like as opposed to getting a weather report from AccuWeather or similar services.