If anyone else ever gets interested in weather patterns and storm tracks, you should try Zoom Earth. It gives you a satellite view, shows major storm tracks, and cloud formations. Hurricanes and typhoons do some interesting stuff. One caught my eye a few days ago made me wonder if a Pacific hurricane could cross the Pacific and become a typhoon, and apparently they can. Pacific hurricane Dora (cat 4) started out in Honduras and moved steadily westward across the Pacific - now SSW of Hawaii. The track is predicted to bend northwest almost directly toward Japan which puts it over cooler waters, so when it officially becomes a typhoon sometime around Saturday morning, it will be a minimal typhoon and continue to lose strength.
The storm tracks in the Pacific have been remarkably accurate (at least a few days out). One recent typhoon went west just south of Okinawa and then made a hard right going ENE and affecting Okinawa again, then making a left and clipping the southern end of Japan, and now predicted to go right up the middle of Korea before dying in N Korea. I can't remember how well the predictions have worked out for Atlantic hurricanes, and this year has been fairly quiet so far.
Zoom Earth no longer does surface imagery like Google Earth, but it did when the underwater Pacific volcano erupted a couple of years or so back. Zoom Earth also lets you rewind and playback, so you could actually go back and watch a satellite view of the volcano and the water ejected into the atmosphere. You can also do wind overlays and see the wind patterns and speed. You can also select radar and rain/snow overlays.
The thing, as an engineer, that has always driven me nuts is how wind direction is reported. If you think in terms of vectors, the direction should be the way the wind is blowing and not the direction the wind is blowing from. If you are driving south, then you are
driving south ... not coming up from the south. One of those things I have to stop and reorient myself and remember for whatever reason people refuse to be consistent in measurements. Like reading a book mentioning "westerlies" and trying to get it straight is the meaning an east or a west wind.
Live Weather Satellite Map | Zoom Earth