Earth Alerts disaster tracker for Windows gets 2011 update
South Wind Technologies on Thursday released version 2011.1.0 of Earth Alerts, a free windows-based application for tracking the world's natural disasters.
The program can be set up to look for disruptive nature patterns in the areas the user has chosen, these could be earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, tropical cyclones, wildfires, landslides, severe weather, or simply local weather.
Once started, the application keeps a real-time feed of activity in the areas the user has chosen, and the user can be notified of changes in conditions with either visual or audio notifications, email alerts or SMS/MMS alerts.
South Wind, which is actually just a single developer who has built these apps on donations since 2005, also released Earth Alerts as a Google Maps plugin which can be viewed here. Google Maps integration provides visualizations of recent earthquake events, volcanoes, tropical cyclones, wildland fires and severe weather warnings, but does not provide the alerting that the desktop application does.