Today's rush to judgment by MSM on new NHC proposed hurricane categorization

HaroldW.
I think your acronym “WHATS UP DOC” was very clever and humorous. Thanks for the effort and keep it up.
Dave on the left coast

Matthew Souders:
I don’t know ANYONE who thinks Sandy was a cakewalk, or wasn’t extremely damaging, and yes, terrifying. But I have to tell you, I live in landlocked Calgary, Alberta, and even we were completely aware what was going to happen, DAYS in advance, and knew full well that there were going to be a lot of people analyzing it afterward and complaining that there wasn’t enough urgency to the warnings.
Thing is, despite the raw energy and destructive power, Sandy was not a hurricane at landfall. The definition of a hurricane has been clear for my entire life, and again, even up here landlocked and a 12 hour drive from the Pacific Ocean, we know the definition of a hurricane. And we also know that you don’t mess around with storms that approach hurricane strength.
I wonder how the rest of the US, and all of Canada, and for I know all of Mexico and Europe appear to have been fully aware of what was crawling up the East Coast, but the bubble of NYC kept the people there blissfully unaware of what was going on?
If I were you, I’d be wondering more why your news and alerting systems failed you, when everywhere else seems to have been completely aware. Personally I think it’s the same bubble of unreality that affects election campaigns.
As far as I can tell, the only reason “superstorm” is kept as a description is that it was more than a “storm”, but NOT a hurricane. And hurricanes HAVE hit NYC in the past… which is why so many people have so little tolerance for what we perceive as whining after the fact.

Herkinderkin said @ur momisugly December 5, 2012 at 9:41 pm

Anthony, please forgive me, for this is entirely off-topic, but heartfelt:
R.I.P. Dave Brubeck. Composer, entertainer, teacher, leader, musician. Jazzman! Thanks Dave, for showing the teenage Herkinderkin possibilities undreamed.

Think I’d better take five…

Spelling and grammar above, sorry, I meant in one place to write ‘can you imagine if your boss told you to go KIND OF find out what was going on with Hurricane Sandy,’
several other spelling and grammatical errors sorry

I purposely wrote that part about your employer telling you to go KIND OF find out about Sandy.
Seriously:
If you had been told and taught and had swung around drinking coffee and bullshitting and having people tell you stories, and having people from every single corner of your, particular burg, come talk to you about Hurricane Sandy,
Do you, as a potato chip truck driver, a manager at the Home Depot and an Insurance man at AllState,
do you as a farmer out making your rice fields and corn and wheat acreage, your roadway resurfacing, your concrete form building company,
do you the taxi driver really believe, that if someone told you go fetch enough information about Sandy that the people in your area could have a… a real good idea about just what was likely to go on,
do any of you here believe that after two weeks going around bullshooting and interfacing with people about this Storm and it’s associated smaller two,
that you would be still so flabbergasted and stupified, that you woudn’t really have much idea of how things had probably ought to go, to get the most return for the least investment of your resources,
especially if every news group on the east coast had every meteorologist on staff and retired, or obliquely interested, tweeting your assistants and you, sending you updates on pressures and humidity, temperatures and swell, all this —
do you really think you would just be so up in arms your response would be “WHAT WE NEED, is sum MOR REGyaLAYshuNz cauws I cudn; figur nuthin owt.”
Do you
Really
Really,
REALLY think that just being some guy who fetched coffee for a third tier meteorologist at a small station that given the instructions to spend the next two weeks, to find out all you could, even though you were a 21 year old new guy with barely a clue,
that one of your concerns for your efforts as you tried to get out the good word
was that what would really have stopped a lot of the suffering was that the hurricane warning regulations made it difficult to know what was going on?
Pfft.

theduke says:
December 5, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Anybody who wasn’t aware of the destructive potential of this storm as broadcast on radio and television and posted endlessly on the internet is an idiot. Forgive me if I’m short on empathy here, but COME ON!!
Is there a point to your little rant – beyond stating the bleeding obvious, of course?

The point of Chris Landsea and the NHC’s reasons for this proposed change are being missed by most here in the rush to pile on about whether it was an official hurricane at landfall or not.
The PROBLEM was, and is, the now proven issue with the policy of dropping hurricane status regardless of strength North of North Carolina, as/when the storms transition to post-tropical cyclones – or Nor’Easters. .
The NHC and NWS polcies created a very poor situation where the storm was in many peoples eyes “downgraded” – lost its hurricane classification, despite that it most certainly was still a hurricane while offshore, and many believe it to have been a CAT 1 at landfall.
The following story described the problems they encountered and the reasoning for what they did:
NHC Reveals Reasoning for Non-Issuance of Hurricane Warnings for Sandy
http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/nhc-reveals-thought-process-be/2384464
I don’t entirely agree with their positions and decisions, but this was a very real problem. As the storm was at a critical point it stopped being called a hurricane. NHC and NWS scrambled to try and keep people informed.
There were many headlines like this:
Sandy downgraded from hurricane to tropical storm
Hurricane Sandy Downgraded to Post-Tropical Storm
Then there were these type:
Hurricane Sandy Downgraded, Then Upgraded Again
Hours after being downgraded, Sandy returns to hurricane
Add that Irene drew criticism it was over-hyped when it was not as strong and did less damage than warned, and you have a real mess.
Regardless of the claims of some, Sandy WAS, or at worst minutely below, a hurricane force storm at landfall. It had winds as noted by a meteorologist in the area.above that were CAT 1 level. There is numerous other evidence as well. Here is one example:
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2012/10/sandy_wind_speed_map_see_how_s.html
In the “Willis, not a hurricane at landfall” post ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/29/tropical-storm-sandy/ ) – I provided direct data from a private provider – Weatherflow – used by (and identified by) the NWS around the time of landfall for their warnings, that showed winds in hurricane strengths.
I also showed NWS warnings that noted above hurricane force winds at landfall.
As an aside the Weatherflow data a was very interesting, They graciously made the Sandy data public. It is well worth a visit too that thread and to Weatherflows site to look at the quality of their system.
Not only did the “downgrade” to non-hurricane status, while remaining at or very near hurricane levels, create confusion, but it also had a gigantic effect on insurers. The Governor issued a decree that because Sandy was not officially a hurricane, that the hurricane deductibles on every insurance policy were not allowed to be charged.
This is perhaps one of the most ignorant and short sighted decisions made regarding Sandy. The action saves the current homeowners their 20% deductibles. But the insurers must make those losses up somewhere, and that will be from all who are insured, thru higher premiums. And premiums in those areas will raise even higher as the insurance companies now know they cannot trust they will be able to collect the bargained for deductibles, regardless of the strength and damage of the storm.
Poster Phil Night I thing had some excellent ideas on how to address the problems Sandy created – how to more accurately and effectively communicate danger levels of these storms. He proposes a “Threat Index” which takes into account the overall danger of each storm based on several inputs.
I think this is a great idea – as the same Threat Index – rating a storms danger on scale of 1 to 5 – can be used for all types of storm events, The criteria underlying may be different for say a winter storm than a hurricane – but the Threat index idea allows a ranking of the likely severity of each storm type. ,
It seems certain some changes must be made. The NHC proposed rule is a start in right direction, but I would think something like the Threat Index – which can offer a more subjective assessment of danger – is a better idea yet.