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The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) is working with Google to develop an application that will allow people to plug in their address and assess their level of risk from flooding and storm surges - the massive walls of water carried onto land by a hurricane.

The program will be based on the same storm surge data used by meteorologists to determine the

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flooding threat from any category of storm, and is expected to be available from 1 June, the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season.

The agency hopes decision to make the data publicly available will stop it from being inundated with calls from people worried about the risk in their area during storm season.

"We're not going to know that off the top of our heads," says Bill Read, head of the US forecasting center. "So we can say 'go to our website, go to such and such, and it's there'."

The agency will also be offering a new color-coded graphic on its website indicating storm surge probabilities for threatened areas. The graphic will indicate the probability of the surge reaching or exceeding five feet within a given number of hours, Read says.

The graphic promises to help local emergency managers with key decisions such as when to lock down bridges and which roads could be washed out or need to be cleared.