Cyclones are nasty things. According to PreventionWeb, there were 1,211 cyclones between 1980 and 2008, and they were responsible for more than 400,000 deaths. The financial cost of these cyclones numbered in the hundreds of billions as well.

The Cyclone Center project (by the Zooinverse team) wants to get a better understanding of cyclone patterns. As such, it’s asking people like you to help classify some of the 300,000 satellite images of cyclones taken over the past thirty or so years. Using the Dvorak technique, and answering a set of simple questions, you’ll determine the intensity of a tropical cyclone by analyzing the cloud patterns and temperatures.

To participate, you register or login with the site, and then click the Classify link. As with most of these image classification projects, you’ll be taken through a step-by-step tutorial before you begin, and your images will also be shown to other volunteers to ensure that the classifications are correct.

The Cyclone Center project is projected to do more than a million classifications over the next few months. The project will give climatologists a global tropical cyclone dataset that will provide a clearer understanding of cyclone formation and duration.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay