Quote:
Originally Posted by darth serious
I'm confused about this: Sandy is currently only category 1 and after landfall it's expected to weaken to tropical storm and then tropical depression - how come it's rated as so weak and at the same time it's talked about as some kind of historic "superstorm"? Is it actually a strong hurricane or not? Why is it so dangerous if it's only category 1 and expected to weaken?
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Some of the most powerful storms of record were non-tropical in nature. I live in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon) and on Dec 1-4, 2007 we were visited by the most powerful storm of any catagory in the last 300 years - up to now.
Called the "Great Coastal Gale" it generated Cat 4 and higher wind gusts, produced sustained winds of between 60 and 75 mile per hour for 60+ consecutive hours, threw up 30 to 40 foot waves, produced rainfall measured in feet in favored locations, generated flooding severe enough to isolate small towns (and a few larger ones such as Centralia, WN), crippled power and transportation and downed more timber than any other single event since the eruption of Mount St. Helens more than 30 years ago. Central pressure was about 27.9 Nothing, not even typhoon Tip, dissapated as much power and you have to go all the way back to 1703 and England's "Great Storm" to find anything that could compare. And yet....
....Sandy is almost certain to top every one of the superlatives I have mentioned in our own Uber-storm and could well prove as powerful as ours and England's three century's gone tempest
combined. Her central pressure is 27.75 and could drop further. She is one intense storm and the Cat 1 wind speeds she's now sporting have little relevance to the destructive potential of this bit-....er....um....female dog in heat.
The reason Sandy and our storm are/were so powerful is tied to the massive area covered by these event's sphere of influence. The "Great Coastal Gale" stretched from Idaho and western Montana clear back to the International Date Line and from the 30th parallel all the way into interior Alaska. A little less than 10 million square miles were negatively impacted by this thing simultaneously. Sandy covers about 3.5 million Square miles, about a third of it within the US and Canada. In Sandy's case, she's working with a favorable (to her) coastal geography, a tropical storm or hurricane force wind field over 700 miles across and a high
tide plus a full moon when she makes landfall a squeak south of the New York Metroplex and it's 22 million people. By contrast, Tip's tropical force and higher wind field was about 200 miles across and even that glandular giant, Ike was no more than 450.
Such extensive non-tropical storms, though their winds may not be up to Cat 3 or higher standards are vastly more powerful because of their sheer size. When you have a tropical storm absorbing a powerful weather front and vigorous arctic air mass like Sandy's set to do you have the potential of generating something almost uniquely vicious.