For those of you in the path of Hurricane Sandy, like me, knowing certain information about the storm can be vital to those stuck at home and preparing for the storm.

Google announced a new crisis map for Hurricane Sandy at google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy and they have an additional more detailed map for New York City at google.org/crisismap/2012-sandy-nyc.

What do these maps give you?

• Location tracking, including the hurricane’s current and forecasted paths, courtesy of the NOAA-National Hurricane Center
• Public alerts, including evacuation notices, storm warnings, and more, via weather.gov and earthquake.usgs.gov
• Radar and cloud imagery from weather.com and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
• Evacuation information and routes
• Shelters and recovery centers will appear as they become operational
• Storm footage and storm-related YouTube videos, curated by Storyful

The NYC maps give you additional detail from the NYC Open Data database including evacuation zone information from, open shelters, weather information and live webcams.

Also see our Hurricane Sandy Superstorm Resources for additional sites that you may find useful beyond Google, and  Tracking Hurricane Sandy Through Twitter is our guide to using Twitter for monitoring news.

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Google: Maps & Local

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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