That time of the year... again

That time of the year... again, originally uploaded by Titoxd.

The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season has arrived. WikiProject Tropical cyclones will keep posting updates as they become available. You are also encouraged to follow @wikihurricanes for urgent updates.

Map projections

On-topic for a change... :P

Die.net shows an interesting utility for graphing the illuminated half of the Earth at any given time. It's nifty, but the fact that it uses Blue Marble, just as the track map generator does, makes me wonder about how it can be integrated into the track program... particularly of interest would be the modifications to different projections, as we're restricted to only a carte parallelogrammatique in our output. They use ImageMagick, so we even share a back end... hmm.

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Wiki is not paper... or is it?

Usually you hear that Wikipedia not being paper is an advantage, because that makes the encyclopedia editable. You've been lied to.

Wikipedia: the encyclopedia you can write in, and not feel bad about it!

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NCDC links to us, w00t!

Well, for the last few hurricane seasons, the National Climatic Data Center has been linking to the Wikipedia articles about the Atlantic hurricane seasons. Not only that, but they've been also using some of our in-house track map output. Just compare these links:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2007/aug/dean-track.png

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Dean_2007_track.png

Cool, huh? :)

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