Slashdot Mirror
Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study
Rebecka writes "Hurricane Sandy, which pelted multiple states in Oct. and created billions of dollars in damage, was a freak occurrence and not an indication of future weather patterns, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies via LiveScience. The study (abstract), which calculated a statistical analysis of the storm's trajectory and monitored climate changes' influences on hurricane tracks, claims that the tropical storm was merely a 1-in-700-year event. 'The particular shape of Sandy's trajectory is very peculiar, and that's very rare, on the order of once every 700 years,' said senior scientist at NASA and study co-author, Timothy Hall. According to Hall, the extreme flooding associated with the storm was also due to the storm's trajectory which was described as being 'near perpendicular.' The storm's unusual track was found to have been caused by a high tides associated with a full moon and high pressure that forced the storm to move off the coast of the Western North Atlantic."
... is that it is possible to flip a coin and have it land heads up 1,000 times consecutively - it can happen and is increasingly likely to happen in a larger number of trials. Same can be said for a "Sandy" occurring in consecutive (or near neighbor) years. One thing is evident - the east coast, sand bars, outer banks, etc, were formed and shaped by this type of storm. I expect the 700 year estimate is fanciful.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That's funny because the year BEFORE Sandy, we had a "Once in a Hundred Year Storm" hit the northeast. And then next year, the exact same thing happened again, but it was worse.
And this year, I expect the weatherman to say the exact same thing....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
So, if we get another one like these in our lifetime, what then?
NASA just says oops and people keep pretending like there isn't climate change happening?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Does that take into account that the weather has changed due to climate change (global warming) and these rare events will become more probable in this new climate?
After massive pressure from Congresspersons responsible for NASA's budget, NASA said, "Hurricane Sandy, which pelted multiple states in Oct. and created billions of dollars in damage, was a freak occurrence and not an indication of future weather patterns..."
TFTFY.
... when another Sandy hits next year (or the next)? I think we are all seeing too many "one-in-x years" climate-related events (where "x" is 50, 100 or 700 years) lately!
we've been getting these once-in-a-lifetime storms every ten years or so nowadays
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Those evil climate change deniers at NASA are up to their old tricks again!
On the other hand, natural disasters that make those who want to cut disaster relief look like hearless fools right before a presidental election are a 1-in-4 year event.
700 years seems oddly specific. I wonder how that was worked out. It isn't like we have any real reliable date past say 100 years for example. How are they extrapolating 700 years statistically?
http://xkcd.com/605/
Lets not fall into the Gambler's fallacy, it don't mean that won't happen next year, and the next after it, or that should happen for sure in the next 700, 1000, or 10000 years. Also, odds of taking a certain, specific path are pretty low, as the odds of hitting a particular point of a dartboard, but that don't mean that no point of the dartboard will be hit, and the same for potential paths of destruction.
The "little ice age" started about 700 years ago. That was a cooling period causing widespread famine and disease in Europe. In some places in Europe, witches were blamed and hunted for the change in climate by the orthodox and respected authorities.
In different words, yes, it was pretty much like what we're experiencing now, including the witch hunts, except it got unusually cold instead of unusually warm. But we have those bases covered since it's now called "climate change" instead of "global warming".
So, when the next mighty 700-year storm clobbers us - within two years or so - as badly as Sandy did, I guess the odds are that it will have a different trajectory. One that is different, but just as awful. - tobias d. robison tobyr21
if it happens every 700 years then how can we blame global warming?
I think the key is if 1 in 700 year events start happening every second Tuesday, then I might be convinced.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Except the models claim that arctic zones should warm more than the equatorial zones, so that should reduce the amount of energy available to power storms.
These records get broken as a matter of routine these days in exactly the way climate sciences has predicted for quite a while now: Things get more extreme and less stable is the main prediction. So while Sandy may have been once in 700 years for the past, it could well be 1 in 50 years or even worse in the future.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"associated with a full moon"...
The moon is the same size with the same influence on tides regardless of its phase. Am I missing something, or has whoever wrote this article misunderstood something?
I agree, people have already forgotten about Katrina it seems. And there are other models that imply that weather SHOULD be different as the earth moves from ice age to ice age. Sounds like a "keep calm" statement from the government so we don't lose sleep over what's to come.
If I heat the polar regions (more than?) the tropics, how will this reduce the energy warming the tropics?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The Real Estate markets are pretending to rally, unload that disaster-zone property before the word gets out.
I think a category 1 hurricane causing everyone to get their panties in a bunch will happen far more often than once every 700 years.
It could have been caused by the robots from Pacific Rim or by the Occult god, Horus; one of the two.
This is why it was a freak incident. Sandy was generated artificially by HAARP, as the media knew, and was told well in advance, that this was going to be a huge storm guaranteed to land.
Yes the government can create superstorms and move the weather as it wishes (See China before the olympics)
Don't ask me why they created it, no one on slashdot cares to know the truth.
Even less certain are changes in hurricane tracks due to climate. As the Arctic warms up, some scientists suggest the temperature difference between higher and lower latitudes will drop and weaken the jet stream, making storms less likely to follow this stream out into the Atlantic.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, but to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, everyone knows that a 1 in 700 year chance occurs nine times out of ten.
Proverbs 21:19
Storms are essentially heat engines, but they do not run on the differential between the poles and the equator, they run on the differential between the surface and the upper reaches of the troposphere.
Given that, I see no mechanism for polar warming to offset warming of the oceans in the tropical zone.
How useful is this to know? It's not like New York is now definitely safe from hurricanes for the next 700 years.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I double dare you to do it.
NASA Expert claims Sandy Storm occurred 6 million times in Earth's history, will undoubtedly happen again.
Perhaps without so much polar differential, they can linger and pick up/drop more rain along the way. ;)
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The NASA paper does not say that Sandy was not influenced by climate change. What they actually calculate is that Sandy-like hurricanes occur once in 700 years under pre-industrial conditions. Here is one of many relevant quotes:
Someone should have RTFA.
...as a claim that storms as damaging as Sandy occur in this area with only a 1-in-700-year probability. As the article says, however, this was an unusual storm in a number of ways, and a more conventional storm causing at least as much damage is more probable than a repeat of Sandy.
We have such an opportunity to expand our vocabulary - new words, like haboob, and dericho.
First, the research extrapolates to a 700 year period from data that at best can be considered to cover 150 years. Of that period we have well defined hurricane tracks for perhaps 80 years. And it's only with meteorological satellites in the past 40 or so years that we've seen hurricanes from birth to death. There are plenty of stochastic models that will give you whatever outcome you desire.
Hurricanes with Sandy's characteristics may have always been, for example, 1 in a century hurricanes due to dynamics that the stochastic model above completely fails to anticipate. But we had so little data that this is the first one we have seen with these characteristics.
Second, we are ignoring the consequences of observation bias. Given the many hurricanes that have happened, I bet we'll find that most have tracks that would be similarly infrequent. Consider the case of flipping a fair coin ten times. No matter what the outcome of heads and tails in sequence, it will be a 1 in 1,024 event. There are a fair number of hurricanes that hit the mid-Atlantic states. Each one may take an infrequent path. I see nothing unusual in hurricane Sandy being rare or for that matter not particularly rare.
I think we'll find that these 1 in 700 events never were 1 in 700 or perhaps that there are many hundreds of 1 in 700 hurricane events. I find this sort of research to be remarkably flawed logically and statistically.
In fact, the only use I can see for this research is to provide an easy talking point for extreme weather advocates. Sandy was a 1 in 700 year hurricane therefore extreme weather from "climate change" is real.
Forgot what about Katrina? New Orleans gets hit by hurricanes. It got hit by a hurricane. There's nothing to "forget".
Forgot what about Katrina? New Orleans gets hit by hurricanes. It got hit by a hurricane. There's nothing to "forget".
But... But... But the Goreacle said Katrina was from the global warmings.
I would like to point out that NASA considers a quantitative risk assessment to be a +/- order of magnitude tool. So if the actual frequency turns out to be within 70-7000 years, the QRA is as acceptable.
... really, _700 years_ of records? And the margin of error on those early 'records' would be? And the margins of error on your model's assumptions would be? Oh, and did all your models agree on this or were they in agreement +/- some margin?
Vague hand waving at best, attempt to placate/influence at worst.
What should have been said, "We _guess_ that _maybe_ it was a 1 in 700 hundred-ish year-ish event. But that could be totally wrong. Thanks for listening."
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.