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On September 18th, 2003 Hurricane Isabel made
landfall on the North Carolina Coast. While Isabel
was previously a Category 5 Hurricane on the
Saffir-Simpson Scale, it made landfall as a
Category 2 Storm packing winds over 100 miles per
hour, storm surges of 8 feet or more coupled with
a high tide, and massive amounts of rainfall.
StormPredator was there. It was in the final
stages of Beta testing, and recorded the radar
animation sequence you see above of 24 frames just
as Isabel crossed the North Carolina outer banks
and the coast. The eye of Isabel passed less than
40 miles Northeast (as measured by the
StormPredator Distance Tool) of the Morehead City,
NC NEXRAD radar station, making a stunning
animation clearly showing the eye and rain bands.
StormPredator has a unique recording and
playback feature which lets you save storm
animation sequences to your local hard drive, and
then play them back. That's what we did to
produce the animated GIF file above using a screen
recorder program.
If you have downloaded the evaluation copy (or
licensed copy) of SP, you can play back this
historic animation sequence yourself, by
downloading the Isabel
history file here. Its in a Zip
file, unzip to a folder on your hard drive, and
the use the File Options> Playback History on SP
to locate and load the history file for playback.
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The
image at left shows a thunderstorm in the Miami
area that is producing a cold air gust front as it
collapses. Note the expanding gust front to the
west of Miami.
Controllable
Radar Beam
Speaking to the lineage of early analog radar,
StormPredator provides a rotational radar sweep
beam to let you know that the program is active.
You can turn the beam on/off using the ALT-B
hotkey, and you can set it to rotate continuously
or only when updating radar images. Beam color,
width, and rotational speed are all controllable.
