Forecasts for catastrophists
Earth Alerts is a 'near real time' weather monitoring and information service for natural hazards.
Overview
You won't find showers or sunny spells among the forecasts made by Earth Alerts - it's strictly a tsunami, earthquake and wildfire kind of kind of program.
How it works
Once you download Earth Alerts, start your examination of nature's less clement behavior by entering the locations that interest you, bearing in mind that although Earth Alerts supports global events, it is tailored to the US. Once you have chosen your location and enabled auto-update, you can monitor all of the major events.
Features
Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, cyclones, wildfires and landslides are all covered by Earth Alerts, with information taken from a variety of organizations that specialize in natural hazards, weather and geography. You can focus on each area separately, looking at maps, radar images, Google Earth results and even news stories relating to whatever is currently happening.
Earth Alerts provides plenty of settings options, from tweaking the frequency of updates to requesting email and SMS notification of any changes. You can add multiple locations and specify the specific locales and minimum severity of the events you want notification of.
Earth Alerts is a very interesting program and will be particularly attractive to people living or interested in the US. On the negative side, Earth Alerts' maps and graphs are not interactive and the old-fashioned interface casts a negative shadow on the program’s technological claims.
Earth Alerts is perfect for the disaster-obsessed, but lacks the polish needed to make it a truly great program.
