The “-ber” months of the year are not only significant in signaling the triggering of Christmas carols in the country’s malls and shopping areas. Sometime in the early part of September this year, my environmentalist friend who has a two-day out-of-town job in remote Jala-Jala, the promontory that juts out into Laguna de Bay from the Rizal-Laguna sides of the lake, asked me if I noticed the shift in way the wind blew. Of course, us city-slickers can’t relate to wind shifts except when it concerns a direct hit by the eye of a typhoon…and thus, barely imperceptible wind shifts are something we leave to the weather forecasters.

Even the most jaded of observers must have noticed, however, that the worst months of the annual tropical typhoon season usually start late September and last till mid November. Ondoy hit the Metro area in late September 2009, and the subsequent typhoons that followed all but pummeled us into the ground in a combination of excessive rain and fury. My own 30+year-old mango tree that was the centerpiece of my backyard garden fell to a late in the year typhoon – Milenyo which was not too strong by the time it hit Metro-Manila, but which had winds swirling at low levels.

When the internet became more dependable and available, coupled with the excellent search engine Google, it did not take long for me to search for a dependable weather forecasting system. Of course there was always PAGASA, our own homegrown forecasting agency, and also the Jesuit-run Manila Observatory that we could check in with from time to time. There were also disparate sources ranging from the US Navy forecasting agency, the JTWC, a Hong Kong based agency, and one from Japan. Somewhere along the way, however, they almost all required one to register or log in. What was a poor member of the questioning public to do, especially if one were not part of an accredited organization with the right to poke into the files of these agencies?

Of course, one could resort to CNN and the Weather Underground, two of many myriad world-wide systems that gave capsule interpretations of world weather situations. Unfortunately, I was only interested in the Western Asia-Pacific area, the famous area that both spawned and acted as the broad highway through which these typhoons would traverse. By this time, bringing my younger son to his college in Ortigas Center meant that we had to be more accurate in knowing the whereabouts of an impending typhoon.

Then, I discovered Typhoon 2000, a site that has become my bible as far as Asia-pacific weather disturbances are concerned. Best of all, available for free and somehow less complicated to understand than the usual gooblygook that one gets from a regular metereologist. The site was put up by Michael Padua, a native of Naga in Camarines Sur, one of the most “blessed” as he calls it, in terms of number of direct hits per year by thundering typhoons. For the first time, I could now see the tracks of at least 5 different typhoon agencies – the ones I could not access anymore – plus useful information like precipitation, satellite and infrared imagery, etc. To be fair, they also carry the PAGASA forecast. Truly, a very useful site for ordinary people like us.

But what is most interesting about the site is that the five typhoon tracks that the site provides usually turn out quite accurate. Thus, when that typhoon predicted by Pag-Asa earlier this year to hit north of Metro Manila turned into a direct hit instead – which caught the ire of the newly installed P-NOY -- it validated the path predicted by the Typhoon 2000 site. Unfortunately, this has been true most of the time. I am tempted to make a tongue in cheek suggestion that even as it beefs us its weather detection capability, PAG-ASA simply subscribe to the Typhoon site and cautiously check out its own findings against those of my favorite forecaster.

The site has advanced quite nicely, and contains a wealth of current and past information on typhoons, lots of data that one could use in making studies, plus a number of supporters (advertisers) who support the effort in maintaining the site. I do not know Michael Padua nor does he know me, but residents of the social media networks and my school e-groups will probably remember me posting continuous developments on the progress of the typhoons.