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Hurricane Sandy Nears East Coast
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have been following and projecting Sandy's path with all the tools at their disposal: ocean buoys, radar and satellite imagery, and computer modeling. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also gathers information from special reconnaissance aircraft, which fly over hurricanes and can drop instruments into them to measure wind speeds, air pressure, temperature, and altitude. The latest data gathered on Hurricane Sandy point to an unprecedented and mighty tempest, scientists say." A couple of our East Coast offices are closed today and people have been told to work from home. Please share your storm stories, and updates while you still have internet access.
I'm sure it will somehow take AWS down :)
Interesting factoid I heard on my way into work: all the major banks and trading centers in New York City are closed today in anticipation. The last time that happened due to weather was for Hurricane Gloria back in 1985. Given the fact that Wall St. is just a few blocks from the water on three sides, and all of about 5 feet above sea level (depending on the tides), I'm surprised it isn't more frequent than that.
I'm in central Virginia. Every school and government office is closed today. Sustained winds are under 5mph and it's not raining. If the point of all of this was to get people to wet themselves over a category 1 storm, congratulations, mission accomplished.
It's raining sideways!
I am officially gone from
Room mates got a little nutty with the disaster preparedness. I took it a step further and bought a cooler, bag of ice, and a 24 pack of Corona. Bring it Sandy!
all the tools at their disposal: ocean buoys, radar and satellite imagery, and computer modeling.
At times like these, the only technology is that which helps in mass exodus, plain and simple values like sharing and caring; and them coming back to pick up the pieces all over again.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Since most of my family is up in that part of the nation, thru are getting the for measure of fright. but for the NY and Maryland regions, this is more about the water. Manhattan will be in a position similar to NO, except no river, just storm surge, and not as many pumps.
And sustained wind.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My office has "strongly advised" everyone to work from home, and the subway and buses have been shut down since 7pm Sunday evening. Right now (8:30am Monday) we've got some small wind gusts and scattered rain.
I live in south Alabama, we get plenty of hurricanes. I have to drive across Mobile Bay in order to get to work. Unless there is over 100mph winds, I have to go to work. I work in an office, punching buttons on a computer. The company that I work for has a main office in the effected area of this storm, and although the storm is still waaaay the fuck out in the Atlantic ocean (yes, it's waaay the fuck out since it's only 85mph winds), we get word that the main office is closing Monday (we got word on this Friday). I have never understood the mindset behind who I work for. I think a better question would be, "What is considered dangerous-enough weather to close an office?" Because here recently I had to drive across 7 miles of open water in over 100mph gusts, and many roads were closed due to flooding during hurricane Isaac.
No, we're being rewarded by having very mild storms compared to many of the other planets in our solar system.
Well, it could be spun for or against either candidate.
That's the problem with self-styled religious oracles claiming omens, it's always down to their personal agenda and there's nothing divine about that. The simple truth is that shit happens and the universe is indifferent.
Started as a minor storm but the press have blown it out of all proportion. Now is a big one.
Wilmington, NC asks: What storm?
God is just visiting New York to cast his early voting ballot.
What's the weather like on Kolob?
rewriting history since 2109
Then why are you posting on slashdot? Back to the grindstone with you!
It isn't so much a religious omen as a lesson in scientific cause and effect. Neither of the top two presidential candidates has been talking much lately about what's causing this sort of thing, but one of them (Romney) is promising not to do anything about it. If you can make it to the polls, keep that in mind.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Abandoning ship into 25 foot lifeboats to battle monster seas is bad for the crew and hard work for the Coast Guard tasked with their safety. The graveyard of the Atlantic is set to claim another prize. http://www.foxnews.com/weather/2012/10/29/coast-guard-monitoring-tall-ship-in-distress-off-north-carolina-with-17-aboard/
no its mitt romney health care plan that under sick kids can get blacked listed for life and for his link to Richard Mourdock views on RAPE.
Mean while, the mummified corpse that is the Southeast continues its slow, unexciting evaporation into oblivion. Compared to the wham bam thank you ma'am of a storm like Sandy, us here in the south maintain a steady relationship with death by dehydration. Nothing to see here folks, just move along (sigh). I mean, compared to a pounding shore line backdropped by winded swept spume, how boring is reporting from a dried up hay field, or hard-packed pasture with nothing but an empty lake in the back ground... No, really, go watch Sandy, she's much more fun.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Sell working from home as part of a disaster preparedness plan. Ensure employees *can* work from home in case the head office loses power or floods. Ensure there's a secondary datacenter for core services too of course.
One interesting aspect about this storm is the snowfall. Snowfall is expected in WV and KY. Moisture from the storm is wrapping around into cold air in the higher elevations. A hurricane producing snow, how unusual! http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATCPAT3+shtml/291149.shtml?
My storm story is well documented in Henny Penny, with the public as the role of Chicken Little. The one without a happy ending.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Democracy at its finest. Everybody gets pummeled.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=256935417762004&set=a.243402332448646.53482.100003366424039&type=1&theater
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
In 1992, when I was in Connecticut, they hyped a nor'easter. It was to be the worst thing since Hurricane Gloria. It came, it fizzled, it was a little more windy than normal. But seriously, didn't even make me blink. It was hyped the same way Sandy is being hyped.
Two weeks later another nor'easter approached. The embarrassed media downplayed it. This second storm turned out to be everything the first one wasn't. My school was evacuated. Boats were floating down the road. The pier was 18" under water.
***
My fear is this will fizzle. And then, in a month or so we'll have another storm, and that will be the one that devestates.
While I was sitting next to a weakened Warren laying in his hospital bed, idly staring at the tv, he turns his gaze to me and with a smile asks, "Isnt weather great?" I agreed, "Yeah, Mother Nature's really cool", or something like that. Warren passed on not too long after that display of nature. That's just one of the many learning moments I received from that time, that good or bad, weather is great!
Google has launched a crisis map showing rainfall, active emergency shelters and quite a bit of other info. http://google.org/crisismap/sandy-2012
Save early, Save often
Neptune sounds a lot worse. "These weather patterns are driven by the strongest sustained winds of any planet in the Solar System, with recorded wind speeds as high as 2,100 kilometres per hour (1,300 mph)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune
I'm listening to an audiobook version of Kim Stanley Robinson's AGW novel 40 Signs of Rain, published in 2004; towards the end Washington DC is flooded by Tropical Storm Sandy. Who says SF writers can't predict the future?
xkcd: Epsilon and Zeta
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The news is treating this like the Wrath of God is coming to destroy the East Coast. You can't flip to ANY news station in the US that doesn't have some junior reporter standing on the beach in the wind talking about how civilization as we know it is about to end. :|
:D
IT'S A CATEGORY 1 STORM FFS.
It just barely meets the requirements of even getting a mention at all. Yet, the news is going nuts with it.
To those of us who deal with these damn things yearly, a Cat-1 storm is nothing more than heavy rainfall for a day or two.
Put it on the news when a strong Cat-2 or Cat-3 comes rolling in. THEN it will actually be newsworthy.
( When your junior reporter gets blown off their feet and the wind overturns the news van that's your que to start filming )
Admittedly though, it is a nice break from all the politics BS.
To Our Readers
The Times is providing free unlimited access to storm coverage on nytimes.com and its mobile apps.
For a storm like this, there's nowhere for this water to go but to get pushed into the 'bowl' of Jamaica Bay and into N.Y.C., and to flood the southern parts of L.I. Also, since L.I. is basically one long 'beach' of sand with 6-10 inches of dirt on it, tree's roots grow spreading outward, not downward to anchor properly into the ground. With water-logged soil, the expected high winds are going to topple trees with ease, and L.I.'s power company is expecting outages to last for up to a week until all repairs are made. It's going to be one heck of a ride!
An unprecedented and mighty tempest? This is a category 1 hurricane. Since the scale goes up to 5, I think it's safe to say this isn't unprecedented, unless you expect me to believe a hurricane has never hit the eastern seaboard. And don't give me that superstorm nonsense, we've had big snowstorms on the eastern seaboard before. There's nothing unprecedented about it, big storms hit the eastern seaboard every once in a while.
OK, you can have the next couple of storms. We'll send them your way.
The storm must have skipped the seaboard and struck here already. Cars are flying off the road. Buildings and roads are crumbling. People are begging for money on the street while others are shouting religious mantras to nobody in particular. Cell phone service is spotty and gas prices are climbing.
Oh, wait. It's just Monday. This happens every Monday here. And Tuesday, and Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Move along, nothing to see here.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Howdy Y'all!
sigs are for losers (except to point out that sigs are for losers)
I *looove* when ACs respond who very obviously didn't read my post. I very clearly laid out how hurricanes respond to temperature increases and get told to prove that they don't.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
I was on a long drive south yesterday (out of Sandy's path, but not as an evacuation - just returning to where I live) and saw a lot of cherrypicker utility trucks convoying north. I saw maybe 50 trucks in the space of 20 minutes in groups of 6-10. Hopefully the long warning time for this storm will let the utilities prepare sufficiently...
I've been pretty impressed by the accuracy of the storm track predictions at least so far. The influence of other weather patterns on the the storm is pretty complex this time, and fairly unusual.
Yet the simulations seem to have been very accurate in predicting what looks like a fairly complex pattern.
B) If trees take out the power lines, you'd be stupid to waste your limited battery power just wasting time on the internet, you might need it for an emergency.
C) What makes you think cell phone towers are immune to power and connectivity losses?
I normally sit on Weather Underground during major weather events, normally Weather Underground holds up pretty well. Today, a couple of hours ago, they disabled a few features due to high server load, and a few minutes ago I got an internal server error.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012. RIP USA. In hindsight, it all should have been obvious three days earlier. That would have been early enough to have prevented it - the shockingly abrupt and utter destruction of the Unites States of America.
On Sunday (that innocent Sunday just before the end of our world), the events on opposite sides of the country seemed natural, coincidental. The Frankenstorm that Sandy was about to become was just another prediction made by a bunch of self-anointed experts. No biggie, New Jersey could use a good scrubbing. A couple. And the earthquake off Alaska was only about as big as the one we had here in New England last week. Meh. The tsunami that hit Hawaii was measured at nearly half an inch. Not even worth a âoemeh.â
Most people watching the northeast were anticipating a couple days of storm, a week of cleanup, a bunch of bitching about damage, but employment would have went up in a hurry with all the rebuilding and repairs. One of the Presidential canditates would have made it a central theme of his last campaign week â" The Reconstruction of America. The country would come together, mostly, in a national unity of rebuilding. Spirits and the economy would have soared, the elections turning into a catastrophe for one of the major political parties. But none of that happened, it's just the ravings of a lunatic refugee. A refugee with a goatee. Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!!!!! Sorry, I've had a rough three days.
The Chinese have been doing large-scale meteorological experiments for many years. They were open about their efforts to control the weather for the 2012 Olympics in the Beijing area. There have been articles published in legal and even mass-market periodicals about the scientific, legal and ethical implications of such research have been debated. It wasn't something unknown to the general public. On the other hand, nobody except a few graduate professors and pharmaceutical chemists noticed the paper in the April issue of Chem. Phys. Acta. entitled âoeRacemization of Novel Isotopes of Mercaptothionitrite.â
The Alaska earthquake (5.5 Richters) on Sunday caused a mass evacuation of Waikiki and other populated regions of the islands. An overabundance of caution maybe, or maybe a proper abundance of caution. Who knows? It's a statistical thing, so I'll get back to you every Sigma, just like with bosons. How many you want? Three? Four? Five? How much time you got? I got lotsa Sigmas.
The Vancouver quake on Monday, however, took people by surprise. It was huge, over 9 R, one of the largest quakes ever recorded. Plus, it was a diagonal slip-shear transfer fault. Fortunately, these are extremely rare, and nearly always found in the deep ocean. A series of tsunamis emanating from the quake bounced around the Puget Sound, creating dozens of transitory superharmonic tsunamis over 100 feet high that pretty much created a brand new coastline, mostly devoid of structure or vegetation underneath all the wreckage. But that's getting ahead.
Nobody paid much attention either to a page 6 story from a supermarket tabloid about a school in India that mysteriously disappeared. The magazine had actually come out in June and was really only a paragraph without many details beyond name of the local region. But somebody did pay attention, and using Google Maps found that in every recent satellite photo of the named region, there was a nearly circular region that was blurred out. In archived photos, however, there was a small town (~75,000 folks) at the location. Somebody pointed this out on Slashdot, and several experts quickly came on to say that they didn't think the photos had been edited. The pictures showed what was actually there. Well, that did it, suddenly a thousand geeks, shut-ins, hackers and conspiracy theorists had a race/joint project/contest, and the story was quickly put together.
A former pharmaceutical chemist from Bangalore had retired inland, and was running an informal school for recent college gr
hi!
Yes, it is 'only' a category one hurricane. That is going to cover ALL of Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusettes, and parts of Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine with at least tropical storm force winds.
Phew. Lucky for us in Canada it sounds as though it knows to stop at the border!
www.clarke.ca
http://m.cbsnews.com/storysynopsis.rbml?pageType=national&url=http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57541911/hurricane-sandy-14-rescued-after-abandoning-hms-bounty-off-n.c-coast-2-still-missing/&feed_id=1&videoid=37&catid=57541911
So the gold vault at thee New York Federal Reserve is underground. When I was there piles of gold had little pieces of paper on top saying who owned them. I wonder what would happen if a bunch of water rushed down there... Hopefully the massive door is waterproof.
Several things about this storm make it "huge", but the most important is that it is, literally, *huge*. The wind speed may not be high compared to hurricanes that routinely cut across Florida, but the sheer geographic scope of the thing is astonishing -- nearly a *thousand* miles across. You could line up two Floridas on a line from the Keys to the Panhandle and *two* would fit in the diameter of this storm. What this means is that many places that might have dodged the bullet of past hurricanes moving up the East Coast are facing something more like a cluster bomb. An individual bomblet might not be as lethal as a well placed bullet, but the whole package is far more deadly.
The second things about the storm is that it is moving slowly. This means places will endure the winds and rain longer, and many coastal areas will be facing *two* near-record storm surges. Astonishing quantities of precipitation are going to fall over the storm's thousand mile swath. There are are places inland that are projected to get four feet of snow.
The third thing about this storm is that it isn't petering out. It is interacting with other weather systems and actually becoming slightly more energetic where a normal storm would be dying. This means it's going to retain high tropical force winds much farther north than normally felt. There will be a lot of vulnerable structures that have not been tested by such strong winds recently, if ever. Same for trees. There are going to be power outages on tremendous scales and it'll be the death of a thousand cuts by falling tree limbs. The storm is just getting into swing here in Massachusetts, and already we've got over fifty thousand homes without electricity.
So this is the real deal -- a bona-fide super-storm like the Blizzard of '78 or the Halloween Northeaster/Perfect Storm of '91. There have been larger storms, and there have been storms with far more spot destructive power, but few that spread destructive power over such a large area for so long.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Some are. Especially when it is due to reckless and intentionally harmful behavior. A drug overdose that kills an unborn child in some states will result in a manslaughter charge. Killing a woman and her unborn child in most states results in two murder charges. In a couple states, if you assault a pregnant woman and cause a miscarriage, you can be charged with manslaughter.
Riductio ad absurdum only if you're non conscius realitatem
Here's a page documenting how some of the forecasts from the US EIA have worked out. These big agencies aren't very on the ball, if we had oil production levels like the IEA forecast a decade ago we'd be paying $2/gal in the US now.
Here are some webcams set up. Nothing too interesting at the moment.
http://aws1.earthcam.com/?c=tsstreet
With the Weather Underground off-line / degraded.... If you need basic weather radar. I found a nice site. It updates ever 5 minutes and is very fast. It has all the major U.S. cities. http://web2.wright-weather.com/cgi-bin2/loopradar.cgi?type=mosaic/us_mosaic-&type2=12&type3=cities
It has a very eccentric orbit
rewriting history since 2109
Have gnu, will travel.
NBC is behind this hurricane. A massive power outage on the East Coast is the only way their failing new show can survive the first season.
The numbers are a bit off but here is a direct quote from an editorial by James Hansen in the Washington Post:
Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10percent of the globe.
Note, he is only talking about extreme hot temperatures but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a similar effect for other weather events.
Prove that, despite all the extra global temperature THIS SPECIFIC hurrican would have been no less if that warming were removed.
You're mixing up weather and climate. Any specific weather event doesn't prove anything about climate change one way or another. It's the overall trends that you have to worry about.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
If you are going to a shelter, for God's sake, take your medication.
Nah, just take a big fuckig gun and help yourself to other people's medication. Then throw them out of the shelter.
It's the ideal time to put that old Randian phlosophy into action.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it