New Plugin – Disasters

It has been a while since there was a new plugin because I was busy working on a new plugin, which is finally available now!

This plugin is all about disaster events. First important thing I want to say is that as you will see yourself it is possible to extend this with many new features/pages so expect updates in the future, which will further extend the possibilities of this plugin.

I have spent quite some time doing research and gathering data from various sources to make this plugin. Probably the most difficult, but also useful and unique is the disaster timeline, but let´s take it step by step.

The plugin is divided into two major sections:
– current
– past

Current section basically shows you information about current disaster events/alerts in the world. There are currently three pages. Two show all sorts of disasters (tropical cyclones, floods, volcano erruptions, marine, high surf, tsunamis, tornadoes, drought, earthquakes), but they come from two different data sources (GDACS, PDC). No registration is necessary and caching is used to speed up loading time. Then there is one more page dedicated just to earthquakes (basically a copy of the earthquake plugin, which has been slightly modified and several bugs fixed and converted to HTML5).

Then there is the section concerned with disasters in the past. This as I said, will be updated in the future with more stuff, so let´s just go through what is available in this first release:

• Earthquakes
  • map and table with info about deadliest earthquakes since 1900
  • map and table with info about strongest earthquakes since 1900
  • information page about how earthquakes are measured – seismic scales
• Tornadoes
  • map and table of F5 tornadoes in the US since 1950. The map shows not just the actual location, but also visualizes the path of the tornado and gives info about its path length, tornado width, fatalities, injuries etc. The marker on the map shows the touchdown point, from which a line extends towards the lift-off point. Also information about approximate damage is included.
• Disaster timeline – this is something I have spent quite some time with. I have gone through many pages and gathered data about all sorts of disaster events that ocurred in the past. In general I included disasters that were either directly caused by the weather (ie. cyclones, floods etc.) or disaster events which to some extent affected weather/climate/nature (ie. earthquakes, but also for example nuclear accidents, however not things such as plane crashes). Each event is accompanied by its timespan, a small picture, information text. The timeline is highly interactive, you can zoom in/out with buttons or mousewheel to change the time scope, sliding left and right moves you in time. Legend allows you to filter only certain disaster types. I also plan to add new events in the future, there is obviously a large potential for further development.

Installation cannot be easier, simply download, unzip, upload, add link to the menu.

DEMO
DOWNLOAD

Enjoy 🙂