It's Labor Day weekend, the third anniversary of a most terrible storm and an American tragedy. As I write, forecasters show Hurricane Gustav growing toward a Category 5 storm. Along the Gulf coast, residents are preparing for a nightmare.

It is incomparably sad when bad things happen to good people. Nothing good comes of a disaster that threatens people's property, way of life, even life itself. The only solace is that, maybe, people everywhere will learn from the experience. Mother Nature is fiercely powerful, and can be stunningly brutal. As a species, we are able to influence our surroundings, but not control everything. We get reminded of that constantly.

Geographically savvy educators have a unique opportunity to help students see relationships and understand implications of our relentless spread over the earth. With GIS, they can integrate data and explore the impact of decisions from last month, last year, last century, locally and halfway around the world.

ArcExplorer Java Edition for Education (AEJEE), ESRI's free, downloadable, dual platform (Win/Mac), lightweight GIS tool, is a good tool for looking at hurricane info. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) makes available GIS data, as zipped files.

The data are almost ready to go, but need to be tweaked before AEJEE can read them. The period in the center of the name causes the shapefile to be unrecognized, so each component of the shapefile needs to be changed -- the dot deleted or replaced by an underscore.

Then, the shapefile can be drawn and integrated with background data. In this case, I've added from the Geography Network the Census Density data

Countless lives will be changed forever by the power of Mother Nature. If we understand better the world around us, we can learn how to live with lighter impact on, and from, the world.

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI Education Manager