Very Unusual Hybrid Storm Headed for East Coast

As pretty much everyone should be aware already, Hurricane Sandy is getting close to landfall in the New Jersey area where it will collide with a strong winter storm coming down from Canada.  It seems no one really knows what will happen, but all the people who should agree it will be very bad.  This storm is huge.  Added into the mix is a full moon causing the highest high tides of the year.

As usual, for the most comprehensive coverage of weather events the go-to place is Jeff Master's Weather Wunderground.  The latest posting:

Hurricane Sandy has changed little in intensity today, and remains a very large, powerful hurricane. Sandy is going to cause billions of dollars in damage Monday and Tuesday in the Eastern U.S. due to storm surge, high winds, and heavy rains. Sandy is of near record-size, with tropical storm-force winds extending up to 520 miles from its center, covering an area larger than a Texas-and-a-half. This afternoon, Sandy brought winds gusting to 64 mph at Cape Hatteras, NC, 60 mph at Kitty Hawk, NC, and 60 mph at Cape Henry, VA. Sandy's rain is onshore from North Carolina to New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Jacksonville, NC and Suffolk, NC have recorded 2 inches of rain today, Greenville, NC has seen 1.6 inches, and Ahoskie, NC has seen 1.5 inches.

With peak impact still 24 to 36 hours away, water levels are already 2 - 4 feet above normal from Virginia to New York. At 4 pm EDT, Lewes, Delaware was at 3.3 feet above normal, Cape May, New Jersey was at 3.1 feet above normal, Wachapreague, Virginia was at 3.6 feet above normal, and Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel station was at 3.6 feet above normal, up more than half a foot since 10:30am. The National Weather Service in Upton, New York mentioned today that the predicted maximum water level of 11.7 feet at The Battery in New York City, which is expected to occur at 8:13pm ET on Monday, would break the record of 10.5 feet which was set on September 15, 1960 in Hurricane Donna.

In a poignant, powerful Public Information Statement this afternoon, the National Weather Service in New Jersey is begging that people heed warnings, and evacuate if they are asked to. They write, "If you are reluctant [to evacuate], think about your loved ones, think about the emergency responders who will be unable to reach you when you make the panicked phone call to be rescued, think about the rescue/recovery teams who will rescue you if you are injured or recover your remains if you do not survive."

As always, much more in the full post.

More like this

Wait for this one! Hurrican Sandy was deliberately created by Obama in an attempt to boost his election prospects.

http://www.infowars.com/could-hurricane-sandy-be-weather-modification-a…

You seriously can't make this shit up. Deniers and other right wing nut jobs (sorry about the tautology there) are so deluded that it beggars belief. I want to believe this is Poe, but unfortunately not. This is what these morons truly think.

mandas, I've learned the hard way. If it's from Alex Jones there's no point wondering if it's a Poe.

All you do is to watch better quality (where you'd find worse is a mystery) news services and if there's anything in it, it'll show up. Joy of joys, it will be the real story and not the tangled botch that AJ would have made of it.

And for those out there who don't believe that climate models etc are accurate, have a look at this paper from February this year:

http://www.ualberta.ca/~eec/Lin_2012_NCC.pdf

We show that the change of storm climatology will probably increase the surge risk for NYC; results based on two GCMs show the distribution of surge levels shifting to higher values by a magnitude comparable to the projected sea-level rise (SLR). The combined effects of storm climatology change and a 1m SLR may cause the present NYC 100-yr surge flooding to occur every 3–20 yr and the present 500-yr flooding to occur every 25–240 yr by the end of the century.