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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.
It doesn't take long for the second guessers to arrive, does it?
Sometimes they even show up too early.
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!
The hurricanes last year put a stick on my roof. Possibly did knock a knot loose in my roof. Finally patched up the rot that caused Friday in anticipation for today's storm... And that's the most preparation ever.
Here's some random pictures of past hurricane 'damage' at my house inside the DC beltway, VA: http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/tags/hurricane
Now.... Even if I'm usually right on this, that doesn't mean I'm always right... But I hope I am, cause y'know, I don't want a tree to fall on me. Our cars are currently in the school parking lot, away from the trees....
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
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/
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?
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
The U.S. National Weather Service seems careful not to overstate. Then again, few people seem to even understand the difference between a Watch and a Warning. For this storm there is an oddball bureaucratic classification thing keeping the NWS's Hurricane Center from posting tropical warnings north of North Carolina. Kinda amusing... it's a PDF at the top of the Hurricane page... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ They are handing off to local offices and two more obscure divisions mid-storm: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ and http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/
xkcd: Epsilon and Zeta
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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.
When it comes to 'pressure zones', Sandy is considered to be a category Three hurricane.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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