Five Things We Learned From Hurricane Sandy -Jeff Masters

[malaise]

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2566
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1) Hurricane Sandy was truly astounding in its size and power. At its peak size, twenty hours before landfall, Sandy had tropical storm-force winds that covered an area nearly one-fifth the area of the contiguous United States. Sandy's area of ocean with twelve-foot seas peaked at 1.4 million square miles--nearly one-half the area of the contiguous United States, or 1% of Earth's total ocean area. Most incredibly, ten hours before landfall (9:30 am EDT October 29), the total energy of Sandy's winds of tropical storm-force and higher peaked at 329 terajoules--the highest value for any Atlantic hurricane since at least 1969, and equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. At landfall, Sandy's tropical storm-force winds spanned 943 miles of the the U.S. coast. No hurricane on record has been larger. Sandy's huge size prompted high wind warnings to be posted from Chicago to Eastern Maine, and from Michigan's Upper Peninsula to Florida's Lake Okeechobee--an area home to 120 million people. Sandy's winds simultaneously caused damage to buildings on the shores of Lake Michigan at Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore, and toppled power lines in Nova Scotia, Canada--locations 1200 miles apart. Over 130 fatalities were reported and over 8.5 million customers lost power--the second largest weather-related power outage in U.S. history, behind the 10 million that lost power during the Blizzard of 1993. Damage from Sandy is estimated at $65 billion, making it the second most expensive weather-related disaster in world history, behind Hurricane Katrina of 2005.

2) NHC's procedures for issuing warnings need improvement. There was plenty of confusion on Sandy's storm surge risk. A post-Sandy federal review of the NWS’ performance found that the surge forecasts were remarkably accurate, but were not communicated in ways that made it easy for officials and the public to understand. NOAA has now set a target date of 2015 to implement explicit storm surge watches and warnings, something they have been working toward for several years. Experimental inundation graphics will come in 2014. It's critical that we do a better job with communicating storm surge risk; storm surge is the phenomenon that presents the greatest U.S. weather-related threat for a massive loss of life in a single day, and was responsible for the largest fraction of direct deaths attributed to Sandy.

Sandy was technically not a hurricane at landfall, it was a "post-tropical cyclone," and NHC opted to handle the warnings using "Hurricane-force wind warnings." Such technicalities are often lost on the public, causing concern that the public may have been under-warned--though there's no evidence that fewer people evacuated from Sandy because of this issue, according to Florida State University researcher Dr. Jay Baker. The NWS and NHC now have the option to keep hurricane and tropical storm watches and warnings in place for post-tropical cyclones to avoid such confusion in the future. TWC hurricane specialist Bryan Norcross had this to say in his Sandy 1-year anniversary blog post: The meteorologists don’t want to hear it, and I don’t like it either, but the truth is, the quality of the meteorology is so far ahead of the quality of threat communications in the U.S. that progress in forecasting is becoming less and less relevant. Andrew Freedman at Climate Central has a detailed look at the communication problems with Sandy's forecast.