Hybrid of Sandy, Winter Storm Threatens East Coast
25
October, 2012
Much
of the U.S. East Coast has a good chance of getting blasted by
gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and maybe even snow early next
week by an unusual hybrid of hurricane and winter storm, federal and
private forecasters say.
Though
still projecting several days ahead of Halloween week, the computer
models are spooking meteorologists. Government scientists said
Wednesday the storm has a 70 percent chance of smacking the Northeast
and mid-Atlantic.
Hurricane
Sandy in the Caribbean, an early winter storm in the West, and a
blast of arctic air from the North are predicted to collide, sloshing
and parking over the country’s most populous coastal corridor
starting Sunday. The worst of it should peak early Tuesday, but it
will stretch into midweek, forecasters say.
“It’ll
be a rough couple days from Hatteras up to Cape Cod,” said
forecaster Jim Cisco of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration prediction center in College Park, Md. “We don’t
have many modern precedents for what the models are suggesting.”
It
is likely to hit during a full moon when tides are near their
highest, increasing coastal flooding potential, NOAA forecasts warn.
And with some trees still leafy and the potential for snow, power
outages could last to Election Day, some meteorologists fear. They
say it has all the earmarks of a billion-dollar storm.
Some
have compared it to the so-called Perfect Storm that struck off the
coast of New England in 1991, but Cisco said that one didn’t hit as
populated an area and is not comparable to what the East Coast may be
facing. Nor is it like last year’s Halloween storm, which was
merely an early snowstorm in the Northeast.
This
has much more mess potential because it is a combination of different
storm types that could produce a real whopper of weather problems,
meteorologists say.
“The
Perfect Storm only did $200 million of damage and I’m thinking a
billion,” said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private
service Weather Underground. “Yeah, it will be worse.”
But
this is several days in advance, when weather forecasts are far less
accurate. The National Hurricane Center only predicts five days in
advance, and on Wednesday their forecasts had what’s left of Sandy
off the North Carolina coast on Monday. But the hurricane center’s
chief hurricane specialist, James Franklin, said the threat keeps
increasing for “a major impact in the Northeast, New York area. In
fact it would be such a big storm that it would affect all of the
Northeast.”
The
forecasts keep getting gloomier and more convincing with every day,
several experts said.
Cisco
said the chance of the storm smacking the East jumped from 60 percent
to 70 percent on Wednesday. Masters was somewhat skeptical on
Tuesday, giving the storm scenario just a 40 percent likelihood, but
on Wednesday he also upped that to 70 percent. The remaining computer
models that previously hadn’t shown the merger and mega-storm
formation now predict a similar scenario.
The
biggest question mark is snow, and that depends on where the remnants
of Sandy turn inland. The computer model that has been leading the
pack in predicting the hybrid storm has it hitting around Delaware.
But another model has the storm hitting closer to Maine. If it hits
Delaware, the chances of snow increase in that region. If it hits
farther north, chances for snow in the mid-Atlantic and even up to
New York are lessened, Masters said.
NOAA’s
Cisco said he could see the equivalent of several inches of snow or
rain in the mid-Atlantic, depending on where the storm ends up. In
the mountains, snow may be measured in feet instead of inches.
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