Hurricane Sandy

[toggerob]

This is Sandy upon NJ landfall, to the left of the circulation (Maryland) is the warm-core of Sandy soon to be extinguished by the cut-off from the ocean. And to the right (New Jersey) is the cold-core, the developing 'Nor-Easter which took advantage of the 'cane.

[Coast]

Please move if needed

I've popped it in the general 2012 Atlantic invest/hurricane season thread here as it is more generalised on late season hurricanes, but still definitely worth a watch!

http://forum.netweather.tv/topic/72496-atlantic-invest-thread-2012/page__st__80#entry2393545

Edited October 30, 2012 by Coast

[summer blizzard]

BBC reporting the Eye of the storm reached 940mB. And that anywhere else, it would have registered as a Cat 3 Hurricane.

BBC is wrong, whilst gusts were in excess of 100mph, at no point did sustained winds approach that.

[Gavin Hannah]

BBC is wrong, whilst gusts were in excess of 100mph, at no point did sustained winds approach that.

Well, I believe it was one of their weather reporters/forecasters that was on the news 24 channel spouting forth this info.

[summer blizzard]

This is Sandy upon NJ landfall, to the left of the circulation (Maryland) is the warm-core of Sandy soon to be extinguished by the cut-off from the ocean. And to the right (New Jersey) is the cold-core, the developing 'Nor-Easter which took advantage of the 'cane.

Thats not how it works, especially since the storm was travelling NW and NE at this point.

That was simply what remained of the eye undergoing extra-tropical transition, in my opinion there is a case for it to have been declared sub-tropical about 36 hours ago given the storms structure.

Well, I believe it was one of their weather reporters/forecasters that was on the news 24 channel spouting forth this info.

I suspect that like their reviews of 1987 they simply don't want to confuse the viewer by explaining the various requirements.

Apparently they are 'discouraged' to mention anything like the Jet Stream as it would turn off the average viewer.

[Gavin Hannah]

I suspect that like their reviews of 1987 they simply don't want to confuse the viewer by explaining the various requirements.

Apparently they are 'discouraged' to mention anything like the Jet Stream as it would turn off the average viewer.

Proof then that the Beeb are notorious for "dumbing down" facts, and at times, getting them just wrong. Slightly off topic, but I'm quite fed up with BBC news atm.

[summer blizzard]

Proof then that the Beeb are notorious for "dumbing down" facts, and at times, getting them just wrong. Slightly off topic, but I'm quite fed up with BBC news atm.

I've been watching it all on Bloomberg myself.

Indeed, there not bad compared to the American media (Fox news for the presidential race) but they do have a left dumb down streak.

[Gavin Hannah]

I've been watching it all on Bloomberg myself.

Indeed, there not bad compared to the American media (Fox news for the presidential race) but they do have a left dumb down streak.

Not enough variety on BBC news. There's so much going on in the world, and the beeb only give us something like 4 stories in half an hour, and then repeat them over and over. Gah, I could go on a rant but I will restrain myself.

Have seen images of New Jersey levies bursting with some severe flooding. And there is another tidal peak due in a few hours.

Edited October 30, 2012 by IBringTheHammer

[Neilsouth]

:D

[pip22]

is the bbc is gonna have a news special about it tonight?

Edited October 30, 2012 by Fresh_Prince_Of_Leyland

[Iceni]

Not enough variety on BBC news. There's so much going on in the world, and the beeb only give us something like 4 stories in half an hour, and then repeat them over and over. Gah, I could go on a rant but I will restrain myself.

Have seen images of New Jersey levies bursting with some severe flooding. And there is another tidal peak due in a few hours.

They're all the same. Sky gets some rent-a-expert from New York saying it's "unprecedented because of Arctic sea ice melting and we'll get many more storms like this in future" etc etc.

Edit: the 'expert' is Glen Orlov who is an anthropologist. Sky's version of a meteorologist and hurricane expert, when he knows nothing whatsoever about weather or climate.

Just checked the Snow and Ice in NH thread and it's more than the same day last year — massively more snow cover in Canada and Scandinavia.

http://forum.netweat...ttach_id=143204

Edited October 30, 2012 by Iceni

[pip22]

They're all the same. Sky gets some renta-expert from New York saying it's "unprecedented because of Arctic sea ice melting and we'll get many more storms like this in future" etc etc.

I think is true because bbc doesnt seem to care about the storm in the eastern seaboard they usually get 10 - 15 minutes coverage of it, then its other ''boring'' news. This is not on because this storm is too serious. Edited October 30, 2012 by Fresh_Prince_Of_Leyland

[Radiating Dendrite]

I think is true because bbc doesnt seem to care about the storm in the eastern seaboard they usually get 10 - 15 minutes coverage of it, then its other ''boring'' news. This is not on because this storm is too serious.

I wonder how much coverage CNN would give to a 1987 esq storm over here?

People are more interested in what is happening in there own back yard and the BBC have to cater to the majority.

[Buzz]

Some of Sandy's snow:

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/sandy-lets-it-snow/844514

http://www.skitheeast.net/posts/id/172492836/10-webcams-in-appalachia-for-sandy-snow

[Coast]

Just a gentle one. Can we slide the conversation over a bit, back to the actual storm and it's effects, rather than the quality (or lack) of the media coverage please?

[Jordan Naylor]

It is a great shame to see so much devastation R.I.P to those who lost their lives and those who have encountered property damage etc. I amm amazed this storm caused so much damage!

One of my friends showed me this the other day, Its probably not to everyones tastes as it can seem quite harsh but it is pretty funny. THIS IS NOT MY PAGE I accept no responsibilty for what is said and if anyone finds offensive, I am just trying to lighten up the mood slightly.

https://twitter.com/realsandycane

I'v heard that it is unlikely to affect much of the weather in the UK whch I am both glad and gutted about. Glad it will not cause any more damage, but I am bored of it just being cold, cloudy with the occasional outburst or light rain around here at the moment!

Keep safe everyone!

[Rainy]

I think we should be grateful for all and any coverage. I mostly watched the Weather Channel, but I thought the BBC coverage was good.

In particular I thought David Shukman's presentations have been clear and excellent. He gave a good summary of the situation as Sandy was approaching the US shore yesterday -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20128931

Perfectly suited to the general audience.

On BBC lunchtime news today he has updated his Sandy watch with another excellent new piece. Not yet on line.

[Buzz]

The chasers are back:

http://www.ustream.t.../chasercam-live

Edit: Just video but no sound at the moment, but there was sound a few minutes ago.

Edit2: Sound is now back

Edited October 30, 2012 by Buzz

[Buzz]

[legritter]

recently spoke to my friends in canada who we stayed with back in may and june and went to Newyork with .its just amazing seeing all those places we visited badly affected .thankfully the storm hit land when it did ,2 hrs later and we would be talking much bigger storm surge .some of those people affected could be out of power for a weeek .thanks to the posters who give info on CAM Websites etc . some amazing snow footage on canadian television programes and cams ,Im off to work catch up with you later .

[Paul]

Interesting read about the Sandy in a historical context

http://icyclone.com/now/2012/oct/30-october-2012.html

[knocker]

Apparently the skipper of the Bounty was in constant touch with the NHC and made the decision to attempt to go around Sandy. Without using the benefit of hindsight I think this an extremely risky decision when he had plenty of time to head for the relative safety of shore. Of course when it was too late this option had gone. I've experienced seas of this nature and you don't want to be in a ship like the Bounty, or even larger vessels if you can avoid it. Tragically that decision cost him and one other their lives.

[Iceni]

recently spoke to my friends in canada who we stayed with back in may and june and went to Newyork with .its just amazing seeing all those places we visited badly affected .thankfully the storm hit land when it did ,2 hrs later and we would be talking much bigger storm surge .some of those people affected could be out of power for a weeek .thanks to the posters who give info on CAM Websites etc . some amazing snow footage on canadian television programes and cams ,Im off to work catch up with you later .

In more rural areas, with more trees etc, they'll likely be without power for much longer — after '87, we were without power for 6 weeks we lived in West Sussex and they took weeks to fix all the substations knocked out by trees falling on them.

From the storm chasers cams NJ and NY looked very wooded areas.

[knocker]

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM satellite can measure rainfall rates and cloud heights in tropical cyclones, and was used to create an image to look into Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 28, 2012. Owen Kelly of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. created this image of Hurricane Sandy using TRMM data.

At 2:20 p.m. EDT on Sunday, Oct. 28, Hurricane Sandy was a marginal category 1 hurricane and its eyewall is modest, as TRMM reveals, which gives forecasters and scientists hints about its possible future strength.

The eyewall appeared somewhat compact with its 40 km (24.8 miles) diameter. The eyewall contained only relatively light precipitation, and none of Sandy's eyewall storm cells managed to burst through, or even reach, the tropopause which has about a 10 km (6.2 miles) height at mid-latitudes. Evidence of the weak updrafts in the eyewall comes from the fact that the TRMM radar's reflectivity stayed under 40 dBZ, a commonly cited signal strength at which updrafts can be vigorous enough to form hail and to lift smaller ice particles up through the tropopause and into the stratosphere.

But placed in context, the TRMM-observed properties of Hurricane Sandy's eyewall are evidence of remarkable vigor. Most hurricanes only have well-formed and compact eyewalls at category 3 strength or higher. Sandy was not only barely a category 1 hurricane, but Sandy was also experiencing strong wind shear, Sandy was going over ocean typically too cold to form hurricanes, and Sandy had been limping along as a marginal hurricane for several days.

Kelley said, "With infrared satellite observations used in imagery one can speculate about what the sort of convective (rising air that form the thunderstorms that make up a tropical cyclone) storms are developing under the hurricane's cloud tops, but Sandy was sneaking up the East Coast too far out at sea for land-based radars to provide definitive observations of the rain regions inside of the hurricane's clouds." The radar on the TRMM satellite could provide this missing information during this overflight of Hurricane Sandy.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2012/h2012_Sandy.html

[Coast]

Hard to underestimate the damage and disaster Sandy has caused:

Superstorm Sandy's death toll climbs; millions without power across the East

NEW YORK – Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas awoke Tuesday without electricity, and an eerily quiet New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air as superstorm Sandy steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain. The U.S. death toll climbed to 33, many of the victims killed by falling trees.

The full extent of the damage in New Jersey, where the storm roared ashore Monday night with hurricane force, was unclear. Police and fire officials, some with their own departments flooded, fanned out to rescue hundreds. "We are in the midst of urban search and rescue. Our teams are moving as fast as they can," Gov. Chris Christie said. "The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of the worst we've ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this point."

At least 7.4 million people across the East were without power. Airlines canceled more than 15,000 flights around the world, and it could be days before the mess is untangled and passengers can get where they're going. The storm also put the White House campaign on hold just a week before Election Day. President Barack Obama canceled a third straight day of campaigning, scratching events scheduled for Wednesday in swing state Ohio, which got clobbered by Sandy's winds as the storm pushed west. Lower Manhattan, which includes Wall Street, was among the hardest-hit areas after the storm sent a nearly 14-foot surge of seawater, a record, coursing over its seawalls and highways and into low-lying streets.

Water cascaded into the gaping, unfinished construction pit at the World Trade Center, and the New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day, the first time that has happened because of weather in more than a century. A huge fire destroyed as many as 100 houses in a flooded beachfront neighborhood in Queens on Tuesday, forcing firefighters to undertake daring rescues. Three people were injured.

A downtown hospital, New York University's Tisch, evacuated 200 patients after its backup generator failed. About 20 babies from the neonatal intensive care unit were carried down staircases and on battery-powered respirators. And a construction crane that collapsed in the high winds on Monday still dangled precariously 74 floors above the streets of midtown Manhattan. And on Staten Island, a tanker ship wound up beached on the shore. With water standing in two major commuter tunnels and seven subway tunnels under the East River, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it was unclear when the nation's largest transit system would be rolling again. It shut down Sunday night ahead of the storm.

Joseph Lhota, chairman of the regional Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the damage was the worst in the 108-year history of the New York subway. The saltwater surge inundated subway signals, switches and electrified third rails and covered tracks with sludge. Workers began pumping the water out and will ultimately have to walk all of the hundreds of miles of track to inspect it. Millions of more fortunate New Yorkers surveyed damage as dawn broke, their city brought to an extraordinary standstill. "Oh, Jesus. Oh, no," Faye Schwartz said she looked over damage in neighborhood in Brooklyn, where cars were scattered like leaves.

Reggie Thomas, a maintenance supervisor at a prison near the overflowing Hudson River, emerged from an overnight shift there, a toothbrush in his front pocket, to find his Honda with its windows down and a foot of water inside. The windows automatically go down when the car is submerged to free drivers. "It's totaled," Thomas said with a shrug. "You would have needed a boat last night." Besides the subway and the stock exchange, most major tunnels and bridges in New York were closed, as were schools, Broadway theaters and the metropolitan area's three main airports, LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark. "This will be one for the record books," said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Consolidated Edison, which had more than 670,000 customers without power in and around New York City.

The death toll climbed rapidly, and included 17 victims in New York State — 10 of them in New York City — along with four dead in Pennsylvania and three in New Jersey. Sandy also killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up the Eastern Seaboard. In New Jersey, a huge swell of water swept over the small town of Moonachie, near the Hackensack River, and authorities struggled to rescue about 800 people, some of them living in a trailer park. And in neighboring Little Ferry, water suddenly started gushing out of storm drains overnight, submerging a road under 4 feet of water and swamping houses.

Police and fire officials used boats and trucks to reach the stranded.

"I looked out and the next thing you know, the water just came up through the grates. It came up so quickly you couldn't do anything about it. If you wanted to move your car to higher ground you didn't have enough time," said Little Ferry resident Leo Quigley, who with his wife was taken to higher ground by boat. Jersey City was closed to cars because traffic lights were out, and Hoboken, just over the Hudson River from Manhattan, dealt with major flooding. In Atlantic City, most of the world-famous boardwalk was intact, but pieces washed away Monday night. Remnants of the hurricane were forecast to head across Pennsylvania before taking another sharp turn into western New York by Wednesday morning. Although weakening as it goes, the storm will continue to bring heavy rain and flooding, said Daniel Brown of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

As Hurricane Sandy closed in on the Northeast, it converged with a cold-weather system that turned it into a monstrous hybrid of rain, high wind — and even snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas inland. In a measure of how big the storm was, high winds spinning off the edge of Sandy clobbered the Cleveland area early Tuesday, uprooting trees, cutting power to hundreds of thousands, closing schools and flooding major roads along Lake Erie. Hundreds of miles from the storm's center, gusts topping 60 mph prompted officials to close the port of Portland, Maine, and scared away several cruise ships.

Just before it made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, N.J., forecasters stripped Sandy of hurricane status, but the distinction was purely technical, based on its shape and internal temperature. While the hurricane's 80 mph winds registered as only a Category 1 on a scale of five, it packed the lowest barometric pressure on record in the Northeast, giving it terrific energy to push water inland. Obama declared a major disaster in the city and Long Island. In New York, the construction crane atop a 1,000-foot, $1.5 billion luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan dangled for a second day while authorities tried to figure out how to secure it.

Thousands were ordered to leave nearby buildings as a precaution, including 900 guests at the ultramodern Le Parker Meridien hotel. Alice Goldberg, 15, a tourist from Paris, was watching television in the hotel — whose slogan is "Uptown, Not Uptight" — when a voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone to leave.

"They said to take only what we needed, and leave the rest, because we'll come back in two or three days," she said as she and hundreds of others gathered in the luggage-strewn marble lobby. "I hope so." An explosion Monday night at a substation for Consolidated Edison, the main utility service New York City, knocked out power to about 310,000 customers in Manhattan. "It sounded like the Fourth of July," Stephen Weisbrot said from his 10th-floor apartment. In Baltimore, fire officials said four unoccupied row houses collapsed in the storm, sending debris into the street but causing no injuries. A blizzard in western Maryland caused a pileup of tractor-trailers that blocked part of Interstate 68 on slippery Big Savage Mountain. "It's like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs up here," said Bill Wiltson, a Maryland State Police dispatcher.

http://www.foxnews.c.../#ixzz2AnlvnSQU

Edited October 30, 2012 by Coast