ATL: SANDY - Remnants - Discussion

[monsoon]

I am an infrequent poster but a constant reader. I would like to say thanks to the Pro Mets and those willing amateurs on the Board who did such an outstanding job with their Sandy forecasts and warnings. I am sure that somewhere, to someone, your information influenced a decision made that saved a life....or many.

I am signing off with prayers, and hopes for positive outcomes, to the many who have been so affected by this storm.

[HurrMark]

Where do the extreme scenarios of a hurricane bringing a 30 foot surge to NYC (i.e. flooding Zone C) come from? I don't see such a storm possible, since any Cat 3 at that latitude would likely be small and fast-moving (that would be the worst case with wind!)

Given the pictures I saw, I would have said that Zone B should have been evacuated.

I would agree with you, at least for the rivers and sounds (maybe not oceanside Zone B).

Stuyvesant Town, which is in 'B', was flooded...so I think that would be reasonable.

[BZSTORM]

I apologize if anyone already posted this NASA video - time-lapse video shows the evolution of Hurricane Sandy from dawn to dusk on October 29, 2012. The video was compiled from satellite images taken every minute from 6:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. EDT. Very interesting http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9XAAw5n ... r_embedded

[ozonepete]

In a post-mortem, I had a "disagreement" with a friend who is a meteorologist about how bad Sandy was going to be up here in the northeast. I consistently said that the storm surge north of the center would be by far the worst part of Sandy and could be record breaking because of the angle of approach. It would allow Sandy to intensify over the Gulf Stream just before taking that curve to the northwest into this area and then the winds would turn east and then southeast as Sandy was making landfall. I told my friend that this would pile up the water into NY Harbor and I posted my opinion about that on here a lot of times. He just kept saying it wouldn’t happen because Sandy would weaken as it came onshore and thus the winds would die down and there wouldn’t be much surge. I tried to explain that the wall of water ahead of Sandy, the surge, wouldn’t weaken as it came ashore even if the winds started to. A surge such as that can’t dissipate until it reaches the shoreline. In Irene some of the surge got squeezed out to the east as it moved northward but with the angle Sandy was coming in at the surge had nowhere to go but onshore and so would get forced onto the shore everywhere north of it: the Jersey shore north of the eye and NYC and Long Island. The models also indicated that Sandy wouldn’t collapse at landfall even though it would weaken fairly quickly. So there would be hours of really high southeasterly winds into north Jersey and NYC just before and during high tide. I just couldn’t get him to believe me. I actually texted him at 6PM on Monday, very frustrated, and said “so when do you think the winds will go SE over NYC” and he texted back “midnight.” I got disgusted and dropped the topic. Winds went E and quickly SE around 6PM at very high velocity and just piled the water into NY Harbor as we all know now.

All I’m saying is that we have to start believing in the science that I thought we all respected so much. We as a country have spent a lot of money and time building an incredibly sophisticated computer model based weather forecasting system to try and foresee events just this dangerous. And the computer models were very close on the intensity, the storm surge and the wind speed and direction. When virtually all of the models told us this would be a disastrous storm, no one should be saying it's not going to happen because they have a gut feeling or "it just never happens" or a couple of the models don't agree. Fortunately most people on here took it very seriously and we had all of the great pro mets and storm2k veterans who sounded the alarm and kept warning people. I'm really proud of all the storm2k people who kept up the alarm and kept people informed.

[HurricaneQueen]

Well said, Pete. You have been a rock throughout this entire disaster. Also thanks to many of the other Pro Mets and well informed "amateurs". If this doesn't wake people up about the seriousness of tropical weather, nothing ever will. It upsets me more than I can express that people seem to think they know more than the experts and/or are indestructible. By having that attitude they put so many of the first responders into precarious positions.

We still don't know how many of our family homes have been destroyed or damaged as the Jersey shore will be closed for another 9 days. These are the areas were I spent my youth and teen years and it is heartbreaking. Many of my friends and family have had homes along the Jersey shore for generations. Fortunately, they knew enough to prepare as best they could and got out of there with time to spare.

After nearly 40 years in Florida, we have seen our share of disastrous hurricanes and strong storms but this one breaks my heart.

Thanks again for all that you have done for all of us S2K members. You are much appreciated for both your knowledge and your wonderful attitude. That goes for several others including WXman57. You guys and gals are the greatest.

Lynn

[tomboudreau]

Personally - I hope this is it for the 2012 Hurricane Season.

Thank you to the Pro-Mets, Mods, and everyone else on the board to keep everyone up to date on this disaster.

[ColinDelia]

http://www.cnn.com/video/standard.html? ... a-noaa.cnn

Long Video of sandy

[WeatherGuesser]

This is why I don't trust Twits and why I'd like to see little blue birdie warbles banned from this board:

Online 'troll' apologizes for false Sandy tweets

(AFP) – 4 hours ago

WASHINGTON — The Twitter "troll" who became an online villain after several false tweets about the destruction of Hurricane Sandy has apologized and resigned from a Republican congressional campaign.

Twitterati had heaped criticism on @ComfortablySmug after the micro-blogger claimed the New York Stock Exchange was flooded and that Con Edison was shutting off all power to New York City during the storm.

Both "breaking" news posts were refuted by authorities, but not before being retweeted hundreds of times, sparking panic as the massive storm devastated the US East Coast and claimed dozens of lives.

After going silent for several hours, on Tuesday evening @ComfortablySmug offered "the people of New York a sincere, humble and unconditional apology."

"During a natural disaster that threatened the entire city, I made a series of irresponsible and inaccurate tweets," the user wrote.

"While some would use the anonymity and instant feedback of social media as an excuse, I take full responsibility for my actions."

The Buzzfeed online news site had earlier identified @ComfortablySmug as a 29-year-old hedge fund analyst and the campaign manager of New York Republican congressional candidate Christopher Wright.

@ComfortablySmug did not identify himself or herself in the mea culpa, but confirmed that he or she had resigned from Wright's campaign.

Wright's campaign website said Tuesday that his campaign manager had resigned and been replaced, without providing further details.

Angry Twitter users had heaped criticism on @ComfortablySmug after the postings were shown to be made-up, and many remained furious after the apology, saying the prank had given social media a bad name.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... 377f7d.451

News and media related posts should ONLY be allowed from trusted, verifiable sources.

[BobHarlem]

http://www.cnn.com/video/standard.html?hpt=hp_t2#/video/weather/2012/10/29/vo-sandy-full-path-satellite-nasa-noaa.cnn

Long Video of sandy

Same but with all the raw images : http://flhurricane.com/imageanimator.php?148

[tolakram]

News and media related posts should ONLY be allowed from trusted, verifiable sources.

Not sure how you are going to control that on the twitter side. The onus is, frankly, on the media and us here on the board to make sure info is coming from verifiable sources. A tweet from @ComfortablySmug for example should not be allowed while one from @FDNY that can be traced back to a verifiable owner can be. You can't control the content of individual tweets.

[KBBOCA]

Just read this quote on an NBC news story about the storm's devastaion:

'Like a tsunami'
On New York's Coney Island, Mordechai Deutscher recalled watching floodwaters burst through the glass front doors of the Mermaid Manor Home for Adults, about two blocks from the famed boardwalk. Residents had been evacuated to upper floors.

"Everything was fine and dandy yesterday until high tide," said Deutscher, 58, administrator of the home two blocks from the famed boardwalk. "All of a sudden within five minutes it was like a tsunami."

On the bright side, we now have millions of people in the Northeast who understand storm surge. Certainly that will help in the future as NHC and other emergency officials try to warn about storms and their dangers.

Not too many in the NY Metro will say "oh it's just a Cat 1" anytime soon. They have learned the hard way that a storm's "category" does not say or mean much about its very SPECIFIC risks and dangers for a particular area.

Contrast that quote above with Mayor Bloomberg's terribly misleading statements during his horrible Sat press conference:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/html/2012b/p ... tatic.html

[...] So if things are the way it's planned and if everybody does what they're supposed to do, we will get through this very nicely and look back on it and say maybe we can offer some help to other parts of the area upstate or below us, south of us, which might get hit a lot harder.

"The trajectory says that the storm will hit a little bit south of us, the Maryland/Delaware area. [...]

Let me tell you first we are not ordering any evacuations as of this time for any parts of the city. We're making that decision based on the nature of the storm.

Although we're expecting a large surge of water, it is not expected to be a tropical storm or hurricane-type surge. With this storm, we'll likely see a slow pileup of water rather than a sudden surge, which is what you would expect with a hurricane, and which we saw with Irene 14 months ago."

Thankfully, the loss of life in storm-surge flooding seems to have been quite low so far. More of the fatalities seem to be from downed trees. BUT not all of the hardest-hit areas have been fully searched yet, and I do expect storm-surge flooding death totals will rise, unfortunately.

Mayor Bloomberg is very lucky that not more lives were lost due to his extremely foolish comments and his dithering about ordering evacuations in a timely manner.

[tolakram]

In my opinion, a really good blog post from Brian Norcross.

Great Forecasting and the Bottom Line
Posted by: Bryan Norcross, 4:17 AM GMT on October 31, 2012

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/bnorcr ... ntrynum=23

When the tide was coming in Monday night, we were counting every inch of storm surge. There came a point when we knew, the hoping holiday was over... the water was going to win.

It was a confluence of every bad meteorological and astronomical thing you can imagine to create Sandy's catastrophic surge scenario, not to mention all of the other problems. The jet stream happened to kink into a most menacing and just perfect way that it could scoop up a hurricane that happened to be in the perfect position to be scooped. Then the combo mega storm just happened to move at just the right speed and track to pass over the Gulf Stream and then angle its winds for maximum storm surge, which just happened to come at high tide, which just happened to be on the night of the full, fall moon. Holy coincidence!

But in spite of that thread-the-needle-while-standing-on-your-head unlikeliness, last Thursday the National Hurricane Center put out their first forecast of a hurricane hitting the New Jersey coast... more than four days before it hit. On this blog, I had been talking about the possibility since the previous weekend.

Then when it came time to issue specific storm surge forecasts on Sunday - the NHC forecast a water rise at high tide of 6 to 11 feet at the Battery in New York - those numbers were perfect too. Nine feet was the final Sandy surge height.

But in spite of the forecasting side of the government house being on target, the communications side of the house was not thinking clearly.

I've been around a lot of scientists over the years, and I've found that they often don't think clearly about communications. Ask them for the bottom line and you get the top line, the middle line, and 10 reasons why you can't get to the bottom line. Bring a good communications person into the room and they get to the nub of the matter in 10 seconds.

The bottom line on Sandy is right there in the perfect forecast I mentioned above. The NHC forecast a real, live, tropical hurricane would be off the coast of Norfolk on Monday morning. The cone was covering the entire Northeast coast. A hurricane was coming and a Hurricane Watch should have been issued.

That's it. That's the bottom line. End of explanation.

NOAA said that the local National Weather Service alerts would be a better substitute. If I printed every locally issued watch, warning, or advisory that I get for just my house every year, I'd kill a redwood. Meanwhile we might, maybe, in a bad year get two Hurricane Watches or Warnings. They stand out. They get people's attention in a way that no local alert can.

How should the rules be adjusted to account for freak events like Sandy? That's for another day.

Today we offer hope and help to our friends who need it, and our thanks to the dedicated people who are working around the clock to restore what Sandy took away Monday night.

[cheezyWXguy]

In a post-mortem, I had a "disagreement" with a friend who is a meteorologist about how bad Sandy was going to be up here in the northeast. I consistently said that the storm surge north of the center would be by far the worst part of Sandy and could be record breaking because of the angle of approach. It would allow Sandy to intensify over the Gulf Stream just before taking that curve to the northwest into this area and then the winds would turn east and then southeast as Sandy was making landfall. I told my friend that this would pile up the water into NY Harbor and I posted my opinion about that on here a lot of times. He just kept saying it wouldn’t happen because Sandy would weaken as it came onshore and thus the winds would die down and there wouldn’t be much surge. I tried to explain that the wall of water ahead of Sandy, the surge, wouldn’t weaken as it came ashore even if the winds started to. A surge such as that can’t dissipate until it reaches the shoreline. In Irene some of the surge got squeezed out to the east as it moved northward but with the angle Sandy was coming in at the surge had nowhere to go but onshore and so would get forced onto the shore everywhere north of it: the Jersey shore north of the eye and NYC and Long Island. The models also indicated that Sandy wouldn’t collapse at landfall even though it would weaken fairly quickly. So there would be hours of really high southeasterly winds into north Jersey and NYC just before and during high tide. I just couldn’t get him to believe me. I actually texted him at 6PM on Monday, very frustrated, and said “so when do you think the winds will go SE over NYC” and he texted back “midnight.” I got disgusted and dropped the topic. Winds went E and quickly SE around 6PM at very high velocity and just piled the water into NY Harbor as we all know now.

All I’m saying is that we have to start believing in the science that I thought we all respected so much. We as a country have spent a lot of money and time building an incredibly sophisticated computer model based weather forecasting system to try and foresee events just this dangerous. And the computer models were very close on the intensity, the storm surge and the wind speed and direction. When virtually all of the models told us this would be a disastrous storm, no one should be saying it's not going to happen because they have a gut feeling or "it just never happens" or a couple of the models don't agree. Fortunately most people on here took it very seriously and we had all of the great pro mets and storm2k veterans who sounded the alarm and kept warning people. I'm really proud of all the storm2k people who kept up the alarm and kept people informed.

Aint that the truth. Couldn't agree more.

[CrazyC83]

One last thing...good riddance Sandy! Won't be seeing you in 2018, that is for sure!

[CrazyC83]

How will this rank in history? My guess is the damage total will be around that of Hurricane Ike. The overall wind damage should be considerably less, but the surge damage a lot more - equalizing it out. It should rank as the 2nd or 3rd costliest storm I would think (3rd or 4th after inflation).

[chrisjslucia]

So the death toll for Sandy is now over 100 - 65 in the Caribbean and 48 in the USA & Canada.

It will be interesting to see the stats on those tragic fatalities. For the Caribbean many will have been caused by water, surges, flooding. For the USA many of the reports on fatalities I have read refer to cause of death as falling trees, power lines etc - I assume many of those caused by winds rather than water. Water has caused huge infrastructure damage though for the USA. In the traditional hurricane states within the USA building codes are now highly developed and strictly enforced, reducing wind related injuries and deaths. It is clear that these codes do not apply in the North East as the threat is not viewed as a reoccurring, every season problem. Same logic as why my roof is not designed to take a load of snow. But will two storms in these areas, in a short space of time, become a trend or remain a rare event? Difficult planning and investment decisions for sure.

I live in a traditional hurricane state, and yes, the houses are built to withstand the high winds of hurricanes. BUT the majority of these deaths seem to have been due to falling trees, of which most houses cannot withstand 100+ yr old oak trees falling on them. Cars cannot withstand trees falling on them - so short of removing all trees, there's no way to avoid that aspect of the storm damage. Homes can be built with steel beams to help withstand falling trees, but that gets very costly.

That is one of the points I was trying to make. In my country there is little vegetation of the size of oaks. So wind damage from a category 1 storm is more likely to be to older buildings, movement of loose materials and damage to crops ( a real economic problem) but not life threatening. In a temperate climate as opposed to a tropical one, the same wind speed can have much higher impact given the nature of the land involved. The risk calculation is therefore not the same. So working towards a risk appraisal system that reflects local circumstances is where we need to be headed.

However, if we were hit by a category 4/5 then all bets are off I would guess!

[CrazyC83]

So the death toll for Sandy is now over 100 - 65 in the Caribbean and 48 in the USA & Canada.

It will be interesting to see the stats on those tragic fatalities. For the Caribbean many will have been caused by water, surges, flooding. For the USA many of the reports on fatalities I have read refer to cause of death as falling trees, power lines etc - I assume many of those caused by winds rather than water. Water has caused huge infrastructure damage though for the USA. In the traditional hurricane states within the USA building codes are now highly developed and strictly enforced, reducing wind related injuries and deaths. It is clear that these codes do not apply in the North East as the threat is not viewed as a reoccurring, every season problem. Same logic as why my roof is not designed to take a load of snow. But will two storms in these areas, in a short space of time, become a trend or remain a rare event? Difficult planning and investment decisions for sure.

I live in a traditional hurricane state, and yes, the houses are built to withstand the high winds of hurricanes. BUT the majority of these deaths seem to have been due to falling trees, of which most houses cannot withstand 100+ yr old oak trees falling on them. Cars cannot withstand trees falling on them - so short of removing all trees, there's no way to avoid that aspect of the storm damage. Homes can be built with steel beams to help withstand falling trees, but that gets very costly.

That is one of the points I was trying to make. In my country there is little vegetation of the size of oaks. So wind damage from a category 1 storm is more likely to be to older buildings, movement of loose materials and damage to crops ( a real economic problem) but not life threatening. In a temperate climate as opposed to a tropical one, the same wind speed can have much higher impact given the nature of the land involved. The risk calculation is therefore not the same. So working towards a risk appraisal system that reflects local circumstances is where we need to be headed.

However, if we were hit by a category 4/5 then all bets are off I would guess!

There wasn't really that much direct wind-based structural damage from Sandy, most of the wind damage was from falling trees, and that surely did at least $1-2 billion in dollars alone. Sadly, that is often the biggest killer among wind, and that can happen even in weaker storms as even low-end TS conditions can uproot trees.

HOWEVER, I shudder to think what would have happened if Sandy happened before the satellite era. I would think that the forecast would have been botched completely as they would have gone with climatology, and I doubt ANY evacuations - or even sheltering - would have taken place. The surge would have hit NYC while business is ongoing and surely thousands could have been killed.

[HurrMark]

How will this rank in history? My guess is the damage total will be around that of Hurricane Ike. The overall wind damage should be considerably less, but the surge damage a lot more - equalizing it out. It should rank as the 2nd or 3rd costliest storm I would think (3rd or 4th after inflation).

I was thinking 'Ike' levels all along...it might be higher depending on how much damage is in the subways...

[WeatherGuesser]

Apparently now some councilman is pushing for charges to be filed over the Twit warbles.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski ... itter-user

[chrisjslucia]

Took the time to read through the first pages of this topic. Turn to pages 5 and 6 - around October 22nd - and you have posts from Wxman57 talking about East Coast hits, Joe Bastardi tweets talking about hurricane hitting NJ with a pressure as low as 950 and a CT radio station headlining with the Perfect Storm forecast. As CrazyC83 said on this page, the difference in forecasting and lives saved because we have satellite data is almost unimaginable.
We do have the data now, often a week before an event hits. It seems to me the issue is agreeing how best to communicate that in a sensible way - maximum safety and minimum panic / hype.