It’s been one year since Sandy struck the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast coasts with powerful winds, rain, and storm surges that caused unprecedented damages in some of the nation’s most populous areas.
Sandy was unique in many ways. It merged with a weather system arriving from the west and transitioned into an extra-tropical cyclone creating a massive storm with impacts far and wide.
By providing timely and accurate forecasts and collaborating closely with partners up to six days in advance NOAA’s National Weather Service helped save lives by providing critical information that prompted people to act.
Yet even with this forecasting success, there were many challenges and lessons to be learned. In the year since Sandy struck, NWS begun to take a series of steps that will bring improvements to the way they operate.
NWS has broadened the definitions of hurricane and tropical storm watches and warnings to allow watches and warnings to be issued or remain in effect after a tropical cyclone becomes post-tropical.
Whizzing through 213 trillion calculations per second, newly-upgraded NWS supercomputers are now more than twice as fast as they were during Sandy in processing sophisticated computer models to provide more accurate forecasts further out in time.
Storm surge created some of Sandy’s most devastating impacts. To forecast storm surge, the NHC uses the SLOSH (Sea, Lake and Overland Surges from Hurricanes) model. Thanks to increased computer speeds, National Hurricane Center able to run more model scenarios than in the past, providing a better picture of potential surges.
Sandy was one of the most unusual and challenging storms in recent history and its impacts are still being felt by those who suffered the most from its devastation. By focusing on what was learned from the impacts of Sandy, NOAA and NWS are working to build a Weather-Ready Nation: a Nation in which people are prepared to deal with high-impact weather, water, and climate events, despite where they occur or what specific hazards they bring.
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/com/weatherreadynation/news/131028_sandy.html#.Unxg6eLDt_j
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