Hurricane Sandy is currently doing a number on the east coast of the US, but how exactly did this ‘super storm’ come to pass and will Ireland be affected?
I’ve never seen New York like this before, so how exactly did this hurricane get so big?
Well, according to meteorologists’ there are three different factors that can be attributed to Super Storm Sandy’s size (it was downgraded from a hurricane before landfall). Firstly, hurricane season is still in full swing over in the US so Sandy started out in the tropics a couple of days ago as just another storm. It began moving north towards New York and New Jersey where storms usually die out because of less energetic waters.
However, thanks to a bout of low pressure dipping down from the Arctic, Sandy actually increased in size instead of decreasing. The final weather factor causing Sandy to be such a nightmare is an area of high pressure out in the Atlantic that’s pushing Sandy inland.
Wow, sounds like the perfect storm. Is this type of thing common?
Well, now that you mention it, these are the exact same conditions that caused ‘the perfect storm’ which engulfed Hurricane Grace back in 1991. You may have seen the movie, or read the book, of the same name. The only difference with Grace was that she stayed out at sea.
To answer your second question, no, this is actually a fairly rare occurrence and newscasters have dubbed it a ‘once in a generation storm’.
Wow, so what’s happening now and when is this storm going to die down?
It’s expected to die down tonight, but this morning New Yorkers woke up to power outages in some of the most densely populated areas, the Subway system was completely flooded and it’s reported that at least 15 people have lost their lives along the east coast.
The storm has also put an abrupt halt on the US Presidential race one week before people head to the polls for election day. It has been estimated by one disaster-forecasting company that economic losses could ultimately reach $20 billion.
That’s a lot of cash, so will Ireland be affected?
Thankfully Ireland won’t experience anything as harsh as Sandy. At worst we’ll get a heavy rain shower that may have drifted off from Sandy in the tropics, but you wouldn’t even notice the difference. According to the graphs from Met Éireann, we’re in for a fairly heavy shower tomorrow and light scattered showers for the rest of the week.
Have we ever seen anything like Sandy here in Ireland?
Well, Sandy has been graded as a Category 1 storm and the worst we’ve seen was Hurricane Debbie back in 1961. It too was a Category 1 storm and it came ashore on the west coast only to make it’s way north, kind of like what Sandy is doing right now. Before that, the worst we would have seen was back in 1839 during ‘The Night of the Big Wind’. That was a Category 3 storm but it still managed to destroy half of the nation.
Will this type of thing become more common?
Well scientists believe that hurricanes are becoming more frequent thanks to the oceans warming up. They also say that hurricanes are ‘ramping up faster than they used to 25 years ago’, which means they get bigger and stronger than they used to, so that’s fairly worrying.
Thankfully, we live this side of the Atlantic Ocean.
