If you’re inclinced toward tracking hurricanes in the Atlantic (and the new big one called Fabian has me looking), you could do no better than Unisys Corps’ Hurricane/Tropical Weather Tracker. I’ve used this page for several years and it’s always very good. It’s not fancy, but the data is good.
And if you look at the predicted track for Fabian, it’s making a beeline for the mid-Atlantic and northeast coast. I’m always in the mood for a good hurricane, although I feel bad for people who live right on the water and suffer damage.
A couple years ago we were hit by a hurricane (Bonnie, I think) and my friends and I traveled out to Marblehead Neck which juts out into the Atlantic. We climbed up on massive Castle Rock which is on the weather side of the neck. The wind was so fierce, we could lean directly into it. And the waves were so big, they were crashing up against the 15-20 foot seawall and splashing the houses, even though they were at least 40 feet back from the wall. Awesome!
I, too, am a great fan of New England hurricanes. My first experience was back in 1990, I believe—it was the very day that Boris Yeltsin stood on that tank outside the Soviet parliament building and stood down the coup attempt. I was absolutely glued to the tv; I couldn’t bear to take safer shelter, even as tree branches flew about outside my window in Cambridge. Yeltsin stood his ground; so did I, but Harvard Yard lost a lot of limbs that afternoon.
The next time was in Newport, RI at a friend’s home just across from the Breakers, on that little bay leading up to Middletown’s public beach. There were lots of windsurfers out that day—I think it was Hurricane Bertha, in 1998, ‘99? Perhaps earlier. I walked the strand, which was boiling with the spray, the sand, the thick foam, all in a throbbing maelstrom. Most of the time water, sky and beach were one; no horizon, no land, just an indiscriminate boil. I thought to myself this must be something like the existence of a quantum particle…