Next time somebody tries to tell you hurricane Sandy was an "unprecedented" East Coast hurricane, show them this

I am equally baffled as to where the term “frankenstorm” came from. I assumed it was invented by HuffPo or Hansens, but I read somewhere that it was from NASA, which is strange considering the modest windspeeds. Perhaps they were referring to the huge area covered by Sandy. Those sat images looked like something out of “Day after tomorrow”, or the cover of Al Gores latest book.

The history of storms that do damage in the MidAtlantic to the Northeast goes back even further than the 50’s and we have photographic evidence of them. Here is a series of photos of Ocean City Md. after the Great Chesapeake Hurricane of 1933:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/eastern-shore/bal-1933storm-pg,0,6378003.photogallery
Look at those photos and you see great similarity to what happened to the coastal towns of NJ.

I think “frankenstorm” kinda fits in with a Halloween theme; we have to have a theme don’t we?
No real information was forthcoming from the lame stream Media.
Hysteria and Hype!

Interesting looking at other images showing hurricanes/storms hitting the US during the period 1931 through 2010 – simply change the dates on the link (consistent ten year period xxx1 to xxy0 only)
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/images/tracks/majors_1951_1960.jpg
to the ten year period you are interested in, so for 1991 – 2000 change to:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/images/tracks/majors_1991_2000.jpg
1951 to 1960 is certainly the greatest number of landfall hurricanes in that period by far!

In 1995 JLK was contracted to conduct a study that would help explain the observed record of cooling at stations in coastal eastern Canada and western Greenland. A relationship between this trend and variability of the Canadian Polar Trough was discovered and a new 50 kPa index called the Baffin Island – West Atlantic Index was introduced. A co-authored paper was published and the work was presented to the 20th Climate Diagnostics Workshop in October, 1995.
http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/u_arch/knox.doc

I’m not even entertaining the notion of hurricanes being caused by human activity, in whatever way or even who ever says they are. I’m actually considering sitting all this nonsense out until the fever breaks, election fever that is. But it’s just so fascinating, who knows?

I wounder if the rise in CO2 is the cause of the recent rise in obesity? It correlates.
REPLY: or, said another way…”does this trace gas make me look fat?” – Anthony

It is extremely entertaining to watch the contortionists spin their way out of documented “precedence”. You really have to be creative to pretend a storm like this has never happened in this way ever before. Stitch a bunch of poorly linked pieces together.
I guess this is what is needed to re-animate the corpse of CAGW. Frankenstorm might be more apropos than I first thought.

Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been touting “Global Warming” since he took office, why has he done nothing to prepare his city for an event such as this?
The reason is simple: Michael Bloomberg could care less. Let the peasants pay for it all.
The only reason he and his elitist peers use the terms “Global Warming” in the first place is because they think that it gives them the air of being hip and cool, since the term has become de rigueur in the upper social circles. Bloomberg and the like are actually less free than many of us, because they must conform to the social edicts of often cruel, yet clueless doyennes who call the shots…
equally laughable and disgusting, really.

At and just before landfall, Sandy was NOT a hurricane. There were no sustained winds anywhere near land that qualified for the 33 meters per second hurricane threshold.
Scanning for the maximum sustainded winds in the area from the NDBC I found the max was
28.3 meters per second (55 knots) at Robbins Reef, NJ recorded by ROBN4
26.8 meters per second (52 knots) recorded by station CMAN4 at Cape May, NJ.
Other stations were less, eg. SJSN4 (Ship John Shoal, NJ) max was 26.3 meters per second.
NDBC 44065 and 44025 off New York Harbor showed 24.4 and 25.1 meters per second.
Station 44009 off Delaware at 23.7 meters per second.
Other stations were substantially less, especially land stations.
http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=robn4
Also, read the NHC reports, before landfall, they always over-estimate the surface winds estimated from aircraft. Sandy might have been a hurricane well off-shore, but it weakened when it merged with the cold front some hours before landfall.

Check out Hurricane Agnes in 1972 as well:
link
Because apparently hurricanes just don’t suddenly turn left like that without global warming. (Once again, I posted this at Phil Plait’s place – after he smeared Dr Pielke Jr by linking to Joe Romm – but it got disappeared. Phil doesn’t like the science)

“So here’s the question, if 350 ppm is the “safe” level as defined by activists Dr. James Hansen and Bill McKibben how did all those hurricanes happen back then?”
Sorry, this just isn’t a good argument. It leaves one open to this of (course phony baloney) reply.”Guess we were wrong. 350 ppm is not safe after all. Which (naturally) means things are much worse than we thought.”
Facile arguments reflect poorly on skeptics just as efficiently as they do on warmists.

Some how this whole saga reminds me of some Will Rodgers quotes.
It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.
Will Rogers
There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
Will Rogers
Larry

All one need to do to explode the memes that paid political activists Bill McKibben and Brad Johnson are pushing is to look at a history book. In this case, WeatherBELL’s Joe Bastardi points us to NOAA’s National Hurricane Center history book:
I don’t see the significance of posting an image of hurricanes passing east of New York City. Hurricanes have counterclockwise winds, so the storm surge is to the right side of a hurricane’s direction.
We were lucky Sandy had better ground speed than the forecast, which allowed it to pass by faster. The mph of ground speed was suppose to drop from 19 to 9 to 3 in 12 hour intervals, but it increased to 28 as it changed course and went through New Jersey. Sandy had sustained winds of 90 mph before landfall, but unfortunately for NYC that wind direction was blowing the surge right at them.

Once the pro AGW/Climate Change lobby called the storm frankenstorm or used the adjective unprecedented I found that my tendency was to discount many of the storm warnings. IMO many of the forecasters have been co-opted by the AGW forces and I find their writings less than trustworthy. I wonder how widespread such distrust is?
DaveW

James Mayo says:
November 2, 2012 at 10:25 pm
Regarding use of the word unprecedented. “They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.”
I think we should just start replying in kind to any climate tabloid use of unprecedented with a single word declaration.
“Inconceivable!”
JM
For everyone who doesn’t like the word unprecedented and believes Sandy was precentented, let’s start by naming one hurricane in that area heading in a westerly direction. Don’t embarrass yourselves by taking too long giving an example, because you didn’t hesitate to make all these articles and posts claiming there were precedents. And, before anyone tries to pull the bull, yes the direction of a hurricane when it hits land is very important to the amount of storm surge.
Cough up with a precedent!

What I’ve been hearing warmists say is that the effects of Sandy were magnified due to the higher sea levels which were due to global warming. Thoughts?

pokerguy says:
November 2, 2012 at 6:09 pm
I’d agree with that sentiment – the trouble is; that with trying deflect the NUTTY claims of AGW effects, there will always be another one around the corner (and probably a direct opposite of the first claim!).
The various AGW ‘effects’ can be twisted to the ‘data’ or vice versa (as we all know). That is, of course, the sign of the religous zealotry expounded by the warmista – and one, which, to be frank, we cannot really deal with in true science terms.
Nevertheless, the skeptical side must stick to actual facts, and in your example, the argument would NOT be that 350ppm ‘may not be safe’ but that more clearly that ‘Hurricanes and or hurricane intensity/frequency are unrelated to increased CO2’ as the data shows – end of discussion! The positive correlation by the warmista is NOT demonstrated and the hypothesis of CO2 causing increased hurricanes is simply rejected. Those are the facts, based on the real data!
In short, double bluffing or twisting the presentation of facts to the level of the warmista is simply bad science and we should avoid it at all costs.

I’ve added the 1938 storm to the track of Agnes 1972 on the damage estimator, so people can see the tracks. It seems this sort of storm, with the sharp left turn, occurs around once every 30-40 years; not unprecedented, not unexpected. Agnes was a bit weaker since it already made landfall in Florida prior to hitting New York, but only just weaker than Sandy (TS vs. Cat 1). New England 1938 turned less tightly, but was a cat 3 at the time of the turn. A link to the tracks is provided below.
Agnes and New England 1938 Tracks

I repeat (and Anthony can confirm) — we are continuing the all-time record stretch without a major hurricane making landfall in the United States. Sandy (at least according to the comments above) wasn’t even technically a hurricane at landfall, let alone a major hurricane.
My mother drove home from the NC beach hours in front of Hazel (pregnant with me) to huddle down in our Raleigh home as it roared by overhead. We endured Hurricane Fran a decade or so agowhich came ashore as a category three storm (following almost the same track as Hazel) and was still category one as it roared over my adult head in our Durham home. It was two full days before I could drive out of our neighborhood as pin oaks four to six feet in diameter were picked up by the storm and spun around like toothpicks through power lines and down onto the roadways. Hurricane Floyd a few years later wasn’t much of a hurricane as far as force was concerned, but dropped so much rain into the state that every major waterway flooded, creating riverways that were miles out of their normal shores throughout eastern North Carolina.
The reason Sandy did so much damage is twofold. First, it was physically a very large storm (like Fran) so one could be hundreds of miles away from its center and still experience a lot of damage. The second reason is the eternal one — in the many decades since a tropical storm made a serious hit on the Maryland/NJ/NY seaboard, the coastal population has probably increased tenfold, with huge investments in property simply not designed to withstand hurricanes. That is just dumb, of course — hurricanes happen. In NC we get a reminder of this every few years, because we (like Florida) are pretty much one of the leading pins in Hurricane Alley where the outer banks poke out almost to the Gulf Stream. Even so, people still build ticky-tack houses on what should be unoccupied barrier islands down here and then just wait for the hurricane that no construction can endure. But the long-term communities, the ones that have survived a century or more, survive by building to withstand anything less than a direct hit by the eye or the strongest winds to the east of the eye.
Not so in New Jersey. Atlantic City, famous as a place that exploits an unfortunate weakness in the human psyche to the massive enrichment of its builders, made a “bet” themselves with Nature when they built their garish pits of human suffering next to the ocean. Guess they lost. Not so in New York, largely built ON AN ISLAND in direct contact with the sea. It isn’t a matter of if, when you do such a thing, only when. There has never been a time in human history when it was “safe” to build human habitations on the outer shore (or for that matter, inland). Damn few human structures can stand up to a tornado or hurricane force winds and storm surges, and…
hurricanes happen!
In Hartford, perhaps they hardly happen, but hardly is not never.
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