Weather.com, the web site for The Weather Channel, has experienced outages and sluggish performance this evening amid heavy traffic from web surfers seeking the latest information on Tropical Storm Ernesto. Ernesto is approaching the Florida coast and is expected to make landfall late Tuesday or early Wednesday as a strong tropical storm. It will be the ninth hurricane or tropical storm in the past three years to strike Florida, where thousands of homeowners are still repairing homes damaged by previous storms.

The National Hurricane Center web site, which provides the latest advisories on the strength and projected path of major storms, has remained available throughout the storm's approach. The NHC has beefed up its infrastructure in recent years, and uses the Akamai network to help manage its web traffic.

Dynamically updating charts of the performance of the Weather.com and the National Hurricane Center web sites are available.

Weather news sites will continue to be closely watched for the remainder of the week, as Ernesto is projected to drop 5 to 10 inches of rain on Florida before re-emerging over the Atlantic, where forecasters expect it to gain hurricane strength and make a second landfall along the southeast coast.

Netcraft offers a web site performance monitoring service that provides detailed uptime charts, along with e-mail alerts when an outage occurs.