Is your city in an area of the country hit by major weather incidents? USA Today has a great map showing the natural disastersareas in the United States. READ the 2 sentences at the top of the map describing the disaster and its season. For earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornados you can also look at this map. Worldwide disasters - check this ATLAS.
http://nationalatlas.gov/mapmaker Map to pinpoint many climate or geographic conditions such as Lightning
Can't find your natural disaster? Try here. U.S. Hazards Assessment
Home Building Information
Habitat for Humanity Slide Show
What are Habitat houses like around the world?
10 Best Roofing Materials for Warmer Climates
Insulation - Why? What does it do?
New Ideas for "green" insulation
Home Hurricane Protection Tips
National Hurricane Center - Seasons, frequency, and where they occur.
How can you floodproof your building? FEMA has advice.
More floodproofing advice.
And more dry floodproofing advice.
Protecting your home from flood damage.
Do you need a safe room during a tornado?
Lightning Protection Systems - Scroll down on this page
Protect your home from lightning.
Blizzards? Lake effect? What are they? The Weather Channel can help.
Protect yourself and your home from severe winter storms.
More info on blizzards from the U.S. Search & Rescue Task Force.
Protect your home or business from a disaster - earthquake, flood, or high winds.
Pollutio
n? Air? Water?
What kind? How bad is it? Scorecard claims to be a pollution information site. Here is a series of maps from them. Here is a way to see pollution by zipcode.
The government website AirNow gives you a map showing today's hazards.
The New York Times will help you find Water Polluters Near You.
EPA National Water Quality by state- It is 12 years old, but has a lot of information
More than you want to know about your city with the most current information can be found by putting the zip code of your city in in the box next to MyEnvironment and the U.S. Environment Protection Agency page.
The San Francisco Exploratorium has advice on building in earthquake areas.
The USGS also has advice for Building Safer Structures.
More about building to withstand an earthquake. (Try page 5.)
Specific earthquake information can be obtained by putting information (just the Country & State will do) into the the form located at the National Geophysical Data Center. It also has a tsunami database, but you must be careful because you are entering different information than for earthquakes.
Drought? Check out the U.S. Drought Monitor map.
Crops? Not an easy way to find them but here are a large group of maps from the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). If you click on the gif's here at the USDA census publications, crop maps will appear.
NOTE - If you are downloading SketchUp to your home computer, download SketchUpMake.
