NOAA Warning of "Frankenstorm" for NYC

[gblowfish]

Next week, hurricane winds with snow. I'm sure NYC will handle that well...
Story is here:
http://news.yahoo.com/noaa-east-bewa...171317994.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — An unusual nasty mix of a hurricane and a winter storm that forecasters are now calling "Frankenstorm" is likely to blast most of the East Coast next week, focusing the worst of its weather mayhem around New York City and New Jersey.

Government forecasters on Thursday upped the odds of a major weather mess, now saying there's a 90 percent chance that the East will get steady gale-force winds, heavy rain, flooding and maybe snow starting Sunday and stretching past Halloween on Wednesday.

Meteorologists say it is likely to cause $1 billion in damage.

The storm is a combination of Hurricane Sandy, now in the Caribbean, an early winter storm in the West, and a blast of arctic air from the North. They're predicted to collide and park over the country's most populous coastal corridor and reach as far inland as Ohio.

The hurricane part of the storm is likely to come ashore somewhere in New Jersey on Tuesday morning, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecaster Jim Cisco. But this is a storm that will affect a far wider area, so people all along the East have to be wary, Cisco said.

Coastal areas from Florida to Maine will feel some effects, mostly from the hurricane part, he said, and the other parts of the storm will reach inland from North Carolina northward.

Once the hurricane part of the storm hits, "it will get broader. It won't be as intense, but its effects will be spread over a very large area," the National Hurricane Center's chief hurricane specialist, James Franklin, said Thursday.

One of the more messy aspects of the expected storm is that it just won't leave. The worst of it should peak early Tuesday, but it will stretch into midweek, forecasters say. Weather may start clearing in the mid-Atlantic the day after Halloween and Nov. 2 in the Northeast, Cisco said.

"It's almost a weeklong, five-day, six-day event," Cisco said Thursday from NOAA's northern storm forecast center in College Park, Md. "It's going to be a widespread serious storm."

With every hour, meteorologists are getting more confident that this storm is going to be bad and they're able to focus their forecasts more.

The New York area could see around 5 inches of rain during the storm, while there could be snow southwest of where it comes inland, Cisco said. That could mean snow in eastern Ohio, southwestern Pennsylvania, western Virginia, and the Shenandoah Mountains, he said.

Both private and federal meteorologists are calling this a storm that will likely go down in the history books.

"We don't have many modern precedents for what the models are suggesting," Cisco said.

It is likely to hit during a full moon when tides are near their highest, increasing coastal flooding potential, NOAA forecasts warn. And with some trees still leafy and the potential for snow, power outages could last to Election Day, some meteorologists fear.

Some have compared it to the so-called Perfect Storm that struck off the coast of New England in 1991, but Cisco said that one didn't hit as populated an area and is not comparable to what the East Coast may be facing. Nor is it like last year's Halloween storm, which was merely an early snowstorm in the Northeast.

"The Perfect Storm only did $200 million of damage and I'm thinking a billion," said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private service Weather Underground. "Yeah, it will be worse."

But this is several days in advance, when weather forecasts are usually far less accurate. The National Hurricane Center only predicts five days in advance, and each long-range forecast moves Sandy's track closer to the coast early next week. The latest has the storm just off central New Jersey's shore at 8 a.m. on Tuesday.

As forecasts became more focused Thursday, the chance of the storm bypassing much of the coast and coming ashore in Maine faded, Cisco said.

The hurricane center's Franklin called it "a big mess for an awful lot of people in the early part of next week."

[MahiMike]

My daughter finally gets her long-awaited trip to NY. Now she's stuck there. Flight already cancelled for tomorrow.

[blsilks]

It has come to wipe out all of the liberals just before the election.

[sd4chiefs]

OMG!

http://gizmodo.com/5955575/earth-pho...s-massive-size

[BWillie]

Its gonna be a tropical depression when it hits and not even a noreaster.. .big fcking deal

[WV]

Originally Posted by BWillie007

Its gonna be a tropical depression when it hits and not even a noreaster.. .big fcking deal

Depending on where you are this thing will be pretty bad. I know here they are calling for around 7" of rain and sustained winds of 30-40mph with gusts of up to 60mph.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by BWillie007

Its gonna be a tropical depression when it hits and not even a noreaster.. .big fcking deal

If you read the article I posted, the issue is that this "hybrid" storm won't weaken like a normal tropical storm - it'll get stronger. They're saying that they could have hurricane force winds hundreds of miles inland where they've never seen winds like that before.

[The Iron Chief]

The eyes supposedly coming right over my house Monday eve thats a picture of Wegmans just before Chiefs kick off.
The storms been downgraded where I live just a hair.
10 inches of rain instead of 14+
35 mph gusts of 50 instead of 50 mph gusts of 75.

[DaFace]

Originally Posted by The Iron Chief

The eyes supposedly coming right over my house Monday eve thats a picture of Wegmans just before Chiefs kick off.
The storms been downgraded where I live just a hair.
10 inches of rain instead of 14+
35 mph gusts of 50 instead of 50 mph gusts of 75.

Looks like that's a link from your email, so it's a red X.

[BigMeatballDave]

Originally Posted by BWillie007

Its gonna be a tropical depression when it hits and not even a noreaster.. .big fcking deal

Do you enjoy looking like an idiot?

[DaFace]

Pretty helpful (but long) explanation of the overall potential impact from reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/c...ng_its/c6svz5x

There are probably a number of engineers and meteorologists who can go in to greater detail and cover things I'll miss, but I'll take a wack at detailing the most significant impacts.

Hurricanes have three primary destructive forces you have to worry about. Rain, Wind, and Storm Surge. There are others, such as tornadoes, and lightning, but they are on a much smaller scale.

Lets go in order of destructive potential, least to greatest.

Outside of the most powerful hurricanes (realistically, Category 3 and up), the wind is not in and of itself particularly destructive, and the highest winds tend to be extremely localized around the eye. The 80mph wind Sandy is likely to have when she comes ashore, in any smaller scale (a thunderstorm, for instance), would be little more than a passing annoyance. It would knock down some trees and powerlines, maybe rip shingles and siding off some houses, perhaps even break a few windows from flying debris. Cleanup from a thunderstorm like that would generally take a few days at most. However, when that wind covers an area of hundreds or thousands of square miles, instead of tens, you get some new challenges. The sheer scale of this relatively moderate damage makes restoring power and opening roads a major task that can take days. This is doubly true in a very densely populated area like the DC/NY/Boston corridor. More infrastructure means more infrastructure that can be damaged, and in the case of restoring power, things have to be done in a particular order, which complicates and slows the entire effort. You aren't looking at hundreds of square miles of buildings flattened like we saw with Katrina and Andrew. Just a lot of people without power, possibly without water. The most destructive wind will generally start to wane within about 100 miles of the storm coming ashore, especially with a weaker storm like Sandy.

Next up is rain. Hurricanes are big, and big weather systems rarely move quickly. Hurricanes also hold an enormous amount of moisture aloft. Sandy can reasonably be expected (and is forecast) to produce rain fall rates exceeding 1 inch per hour. Because it's moving slowly, it is realistic to expect some areas will see total rainfall exceeding 12 inches. Except for the very highest ground (and even then, only high ground with excellent drainage) or areas very near the shore, this is going to cause flooding. There is simply no avoiding it. Ditches will turn in to small streams. Small streams will turn in to raging white water rapids, and both will have a tendency to jump banks, which can cause property flooding and road closures. Large rivers could rise several feet, flooding areas near their banks, and areas that are poorly drained will suffer serious ponding of water that will also close roads and damage property. This can be expected to reach up to 250 miles inland . This sort of flooding tends to be relatively short lived, and major property damage will occur in pockets in the most flood prone areas. This is the first threat that has the potential to displace large numbers of people for prolonged periods of time, but the sporadic distribution makes it easier to deal with. Again, you aren't going to see hundreds or thousands of square miles rendered uninhabitable like we saw with Katrina's flooding of New Orleans. The amount of steady rain that the PA/NY/MD area is receiving in advance of this storm isn't going to help though. Here in western PA, we've already received about an inch of rain in the last 36 hours, and the ground will likely saturate long before Sandy actually arrives.

The last, and most worrisome risk with Sandy is the Storm Surge. Hurricanes move a hell of a lot of ocean water around, by sheer force of wind across the surface. They also create a sort of 'bulge' of water directly below them from the low air pressure, and the inward and upward air motion at the center of the storm. The pressure induced surge is very close to the eye. The wind driven surge tends to be on the northwestern corner of the storm, when it's making landfall from the east like Sandy is. This is because of what they call the 'onshore fetch'. As the winds rotate around the center of the storm, the point where they impact the shore closest to a right angle tends to be where you get the largest surge. When these high water events coincide with a normal high tide, bad things happen. Luckily, right now, the NHC is expecting landfall somewhere between midnight and 4am on Tuesday. This is good, this is near low tide, but they still expect tides to be 6-11 feet above normal.

If you think about how much of the area around NYC and coastal New Jersey are only a few feet above the beach, or exist along the rivers, which are even closer to sea level, you can get an idea of how much of the region is likely to suffer significant flooding. Storm surge tends to destroy buildings right along the coast through wave action, and render buildings further inland, especially near coastal rivers, uninhabitable just through water damage, and the long term complications of that. Mold, mud, and limited availability of building supplies and manpower make recovering from widespread storm surge events a protracted process.

If the storm were to slow down by about 7 hours, and make landfall around 9am Tuesday, at its current projected landfall in central or northern New Jersey, it could be a worst case for NYC, because that maximum storm surge on the northwestern corner will drive water right in to the Hudson, at high tide.

All of that said, it boils down to this. This is not going to be a Katrina caliber storm. There's a hell of a lot of infrastructure in the region that is going to ensure a rapid response from emergency workers and the government. They've got a lot of warning. Katrina intensified rapidly right before landfall, Sandy isn't likely to. Also, the area isn't apt to flood and then stay flooded like New Orleans did.

You're going to see a huge chunk of real estate without power, probably in to the weekend, but it should rapidly recover after that. You're going to see a huge chunk of real estate under water, but it should subside by Thursday. The number of people who live above street level in that region, and the cold weather behind the storm, should keep the number of displaced people to a manageable number. There will still be thousands. Maybe tens of thousands, but you aren't going to see the hundreds of thousands of people that are rendered homeless long term like you saw on the Gulf Coast. The fact that there is high ground readily accessible from these areas (looking at topo maps of coastal NY and NJ, virtually nobody is more than 10 miles from land higher than 100 feet above sea level, and nobody in the low areas is very far from buildings higher than 3 stories) you aren't going to see the massive humanitarian crisis that delayed evacuation and rescue caused in the Gulf Coast.

It's going to suck. It's going to shut down the NYC area for probably close to a week. It's going to cause miserable weather and widespread power outages reaching well in to eastern PA, New Jersey, eastern MD, and southern New York. It's going to ruin trick-or-treat. It isn't going to kill thousands. It isn't going to leave hundreds of thousands homeless for months or years. It isn't going to render large swaths of urban areas uninhabitable.

It is going to give an election weary public and media something else to talk about for a week.

Qualifications: 20 years as a storm chaser and amateur meteorologist, including 8 years chasing hurricanes in the Gulf States. 10 years doing disaster prep and relief volunteer work. 5 Years as a volunteer firefighter, numerous responses to storm damage calls.

[GoChargers]

All my classes got cancelled for tomorrow, so this storm will suck incrementally less for me. But damn, that's a big-ass storm. Knowing National Grid, people's power will be out for at least a week.

[Bump]

looks like its supposed to go west in land right before boston. cool.

[Aries Walker]

The only disagreement I have with the Reddit post quoted by DaFace above is not really even a disagreement, but an expounding on the section on rain. Unlike the relatively flat and even area around Louisiana, the mid-Atlantic is on the fall line of an old granite mountain range, with plenty of river valleys carving channels into the rock. As a result, a terrible rainstorm like this can cause horrendous damage if a localized cell of rain hits the right - that is, wrong - place. In the case of Agnes in 1972, that place was the area around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town on the banks of the Susquehanna, which was submerged in flood water to the ceilings of two story buildings. It caused tremendous loss of property before it was washed away; the effects are still being felt today.

So, usually, the rain is as he described, but it has the capacity to do even more damage than the storm surge, if it hits the right place. And there are a lot of right places round here.

[BryanBusby]

Originally Posted by BWillie007

Its gonna be a tropical depression when it hits and not even a noreaster.. .big fcking deal

Yeah except for the fact that it's actually going to get stronger once it hits the coast.

[chefsos]

Rain and wind is getting pretty hard now...and it's just getting started. Two full days to go. Sandy (that bitch) is still 300 miles away.

I attempted to go to work today, but apparently they're taking the state of emergency and travel ban seriously. Everything's closed.