Tick Tock, Timing is Important with Hurricane Sandy
By Brian Dooling on October 25, 2012, 11:30am Last modified: January 7, 2013, 5:43pm
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Timing is everything in meteorology but so are the impacts.
Timing will determine how quickly the storm gets pulled to the northwest or even the small possibility it will go out to sea. Depending on where the storm ends up hitting the coast will change the landfall time dramatically from anywhere between Sunday evening in the mid Atlantic to Tuesday night in Maine. As of right now minutes after the 11am update the National Hurricane Center puts extra tropical storm Sandy just off the coast of New Jersey at 8 AM on Tuesday morning! (pretty close to worst case scenario for CT!)
Impacts from these storms are all about timing as well. One reason a weakening Tropical Storm Irene was so destructive along the coast was due to its corresponding arrival with an astronomical high tide. Unfortunately it looks like timing will be against us again if Sandy pays a visit, with a full moon on Monday tides will already be running above normal. With that said sandy looks to be a longer duration storm as it transforms into a hybrid, giving the potential to place the CT shoreline at the mercy of multiple high tides with onshore winds.
Timing is also important because normally storms speed up once passing the outer banks, due to the westerlies (winds in the atmosphere that blow from west to east in the northern hemisphere). This happened with the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 where it passed the outer banks in the morning of September 21, 1938, predicted to go out to sea, by 3 that afternoon the storms forward speed was estimated at 60 mph and it was slamming into the unprepared south New England coasts. This is important because although the storm is predicted to slowly move up towards New England, acceleration is common which gives very little time to prepare!
We don't know yet if the storm will hit or how strong it will be but I would like to stress one thing... This storm has the potential to be dangerous and unlike Tropical Storm Irene last year, Sandy will impact us during the work week! It's great that people will have beautiful weather this weekend to prepare but you may want to get work stuff in order now just in case you decide to stay home on Monday or Tuesday! There's nothing worse than people putting themselves in horrible situations all in the name of work even though many are forced to. Timing would be horrible if a tropical hybrid storm is blowing through with the traffic we have in this state!
Finally I find it very interesting that Sandy may begin to impact us on Monday October 29th, one year to the date of "snowtober" talk about timing!
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