First, residents of Vancouver were asked to boil their tap water before drinking it because wind storms was wreaking havoc along the Pacific for the past couple weeks stirring up a lot of dirt and minerals in the local reservoirs. Now, the city is under a heavy snow warning. After hearing about this news from friends and family, I thought I'd get online and see if I could find some images of snowy Vancouver. This is a live picture of English Bay in downtown Vancouver facing west towards Kits. The above webcam is brought to you by Katkam.ca, which is updated every 15 minutes from dawn to dusk.
If no climate change is happening, what do you call this? According to a recent email I received, 2006 has already seen a large increase in named storms over 2005 in the western Pacific: 43 (as of the end of November) compared to 26 for the whole of last year. The Philippines is expected to recieve a huge tropical storm named "Durian" in the next few days. The image above is the storm track that Durian is expected to take as it makes landfall on 1 December 2006
For those of you interested in disasters (natural or human-made), here's a map on Tropical Storm Risk in the Asia Pacific Region. Its interesting to see that one of the high risk areas is also in the path of Tropical Storm Durian. And for those of you who wonder what I do, as a part-time gig I'm helping out OCHA, the UN's disaster agency, by making maps like this one for them. Here's a link to more maps.