Niche Forum Content Time!
Hey folks, it's time for another Hurricane Season thread involving more wild conjecture from me. This time it's
Hurricane Sandy, a modest hurricane that packed something of a punch in the Caribbean causing a fair bit of property damage and, sadly, killing sixty of so people. It's currently tracked to hit the Eastern Seaboard between the hours of two and eight o'clock on Tuesday morning.
This isn't any sort of normal hurricane, however. Usually after bopping around the gulf waters hurricanes take advantage of environmental flow. The general mass of air wants to move flow towards low pressure areas, while high pressure systems block flow movement. This is why things are nice, sunny and settled when we have a big blob of high pressure over the UK. It blocks any attempt by frigid Russian air masses or nasty wet Atlantic troughs from raining on our parade.
Unfortunately as we have seen this usual happy chunk of high pressure has instead stalled this year over the mid Atlantic, causing the bad weather from the North to flow around it and towards the UK, which became vexed by a parade of come-hither lows. It's this same high pressure zone squatting in the mid Atlantic which is preventing Hurricane Sandy from curving out over sea. Picture it like this - a hurricane is like a leaf flowing down the gutter towards a drain. But now something's blocked this drain, so the leaf stalls. In this case causing the hurricane to just edge slowly Northward. This has happened oft before and although it causes lots of rain and choppy waters along the coast it isn't too bad.
But in this case a new drain has opened up, this time over Canada as an aggressive winter storm of low pressure is sucking that air mass up and to the East. It's this that is steering Sandy towards the North Eastern seaboard.
But hey, hurricanes are fuelled by warm wate and are killed by cold right? Fuggedabout! (As imminently affected New Jersey types might say.)
Well, in this case, no. And for a number of reasons. First of all the hurricane is trundling over the gulf stream, a warmer mass of water than it usually gets to feed off in that area. Of course, it doesn't compare to the pleasant bath water of the gulf, but it is still having an effect. And due to global warming it's on average a degree warmer than it used to be a decade ago. It may not sound like much, but it's a big factor. Moist heat energy more than anything else fuels hurricanes.
The second factor is that the winter storm from Canada. It's a big trough of cold that's going to hook up with the warm hurricane mass. When warm and cold meet it causes 'baroclinic' energy and this injection is going to power the hurricane and sustain it. It's not the same injection as a hot spot of warm gulf water would have, but its still something. Eventually this cold mass will overwhelm and utterly destroy Sandy, probably someplace just South of the Canadian border, but it will be an unpleasant and very wet storm until then.
The third factor is that Sandy's incredibly big. Really, really big. Super big. Its tropical storm force winds extend over 660 miles in diameter, while 12 foot high seas extend over 1,000 miles across. Now, the wind damage isn't going to be that bad. It's modelled at 2.3 out of 6 on the IKE damage potential scale. So we won't see any roofs ripped off, even at landfall. However, all the trees are still in leaf so there will be lots of fallen branches and the odd tree. Doesn't sound so bad? Well remember that Sandy's reach is massive, so this is essentially three and more states full of simultaneous power outages as the network becomes overwhelmed with downed power lines. Some estimates are predicting up to a week without electricity for a big chunk of the North Eastern seaboard. Part of the reason why she is so big is that wind sheer is disrupting her formation, stopping her from tightening up and shrinking like normal hurricanes. This is good in that it keeps the wind speeds down, but bad in that it's causing the above massive reach.
Another factor that affects her size is her super-low pressure, a characteristic of huge weak intensity storms. Now it's very low at 950mb and this low pressure as much as the wind is what is driving the waves and piling them up - which is the foruth factor. This steadily mounting wave mass is being pushed North of the hurricane and when it turns its inevitable curve to the left the storm surge is going to mount up on the North Eastern side. With the current 'cone of uncertainty' resting between Chesapeake Bay and the top of Rhode Island, Sandy is universally averaging a modelled landfall bang slap on New Jersey, which means that New York is getting a big chunk of the surge. This surge is going to hit on a lunar tide. Storm surge is predicted at between seven and eleven feet according to SLOSH models for New York. If the subway flooded, Dr. Klaus H. Jacob of Columbia University's Earth Institute cites that the subway would be knocked out for a month, at the cost of around 55 billion dollars. The IKE rating puts its damage potential at 5.4 out of 6.
So, it all sounds terrible mega-doom like the media say. Well, there is reason to be hopeful, if not sanguine.
First of which is that Sandy has sped up in her turn. This still puts her on New Jersey, but she will be crossing the ocean faster. Current projections have just shifted from her crawling over seaboard at such a rate as to make high and low tides meaningless, to a brisker stroll which should have her crossing at low tide. This will mean that her storm surge should be about the same as Irene's; troubling but not enough to seriously inconvenience New York. Dr. Jeff Masters puts her at a 20% chance of flooding part of the system.
Secondly is that Sandy is hitting when the soil isn't nearly so satuated as Irene's. This may mean less tree loss, less power outages and a lot less flooding than we saw in Vermont and upper New York State, which was the main cause of dollar damage.
So it's all up in the year. The media are talking up the 'Frankenstorm' and making it sound like a certain monster. It's one bad motherfucker, that's sure. But I don't think its anywhere near apocalyptic. One thing that's making me frown at the hype is that Irene had a 5.2 out of 6 destructive potential for New York modelled as its storm surge, and though it caused four feet of flooding in Battery Park it to be honest was a damp squib for the coast. (It was the flooding in the inland states which made it a monster.) Now, if Sandy slows down again and if the sheer stops playing up in the near future, causing an intensification, and if that high tide is present... things might be very unpleasant indeed and insurance company workers will have to say goodbye to their bonuses.
But rumours have it that the insurance market is predicting this one at a modest $2 billion, so it may not actually be that bad at all.
Of course, the worst hurricane New York ever suffered was in 1938, which barged in unannounced with a big storm surge and killed six hundred, mainly on Rhode Island. It also almost drowned Katherine Hepburn, which would have meant no Bringing up Baby or African Queen. But Sandy isn't going to be one of those though, so phew. In fact, I think it's not going to be anywhere near as bad as the American media have it. One to be concerned about, sure, but nothing truly awful.
I think mainly why I find this one so fascinating is that there hasn't been one before like it. It's got the scientists stumped and they've admitted that a lot of what they're predicting is conjecture. The SLOSH models aren't as accurate for the Eastern Seaboard as they are for the gulf states for obvious reasons, so they just don't know for sure what it's going to do. But it's kinda fascinating trying to find out. Plus it'll be interesting seeing how it'll affect the US elections. Though I am trying not to look.
Go here for well reasoned updates:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMastersStay here for poorly translated scraching-heads updates. My opinion may change dramatically, the next 48 hours are going to reveal a lot about this storm and show us whether its a ho-hum or a massive shitting-crikey.
P.S: Subject title refers to the hurricane being dead on arrival or drunk and disorderly, not people. I don't think this one is going to be a killer, but it may be election disrupting and economically awful, obv.
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