After a brief warmup mid-week, we return to more seasonable fall weather for the weekend. Luckily, it appears that this weekend should be rain free, providing excellent conditions for Halloween revelers, Mets fans, and NYC Marathon runners alike. It was quite a different story 3 years ago this weekend, when the city and indeed the entire region was just beginning to comprehend the scope and magnitude of the destruction wrought by a once in 500 year storm: Hurricane Sandy.

Rest of today – sunny, with a high right around average at 60ºF. It will be a chilly evening with lows in the 40s. Temperatures during game time at Citi Field should be in the low-50s.

Saturday – cooler, with highs in the mid-50s, but again with plenty of sun with high pressure in the vicinity. Temperatures for trick-or-treaters out there should again be in the low-50s range tomorrow afternoon and early evening. Weather for World Series game 4 should also be in that low-50s range.

Sunday – AM temperatures should at race time for the marathon should be hovering right around the 50ºF mark with only a light wind. High temperatures warm up into the low-60s later in the day with a warm front moving through. Temperatures won’t cool off that much during the early evening hours, so if the Mets do make it to game 5, conditions should be good for viewing the game. There is only a slight chance for showers overnight into Sunday.

Monday – clouds and sun on Monday with temperatures climbing into the low-mid 60s.

Hurricane Sandy Retrospective

Yesterday marked the 3-year anniversary of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall on the central New Jersey coast. Sandy was in many ways a uniquely devastating force of nature: as it matured, it’s size ballooned, allowing for it to push up a significant storm surge ahead of it. Unlike most mature tropical cyclones that reach the mid-latitudes, Sandy did not recurve out to sea and spare the East Coast. At these latitudes, the predominant wind patterns are from the west (the westerlies), and there’s usually a cold front that pushes tropical cyclones to the east. In Sandy’s case, a low pressure system to its northwest actually produced the opposite effect: Sandy was pulled to the northwest along the counterclockwise cyclonic flow around that low pressure system. This resulted in a historic landfall on costal New Jersey. As the forecast models came into consensus on this result, I began to fear for the worst. Because Hurricane Irene had passed the previous year with great hype, but minimal damage, I had a bad feeling that many New Yorkers would not heed the warnings about this monster storm, even though there was high confidence in an historic event about to unfold.

Sandy’s landfall also coincided with a supermoon high-tide, which meant that its already significant storm surge was augmented that much more by the pull of the moon. This resulted in catastrophic storm surge inundation along a vast expanse of the Northeast. The geology and bathymetry of New York Harbor made it all the more susceptible to storm surge, as its funnel shape served to channel and amplify Sandy’s storm surge. The fact that Sandy made its land fall to the south of New York meant that its most damaging northeast quadrant (Northern Hemisphere cyclones get a boost in the northeast quadrant because the direction of winds in that quadrant coincide with the direction of the Earth’s Coriolis force) hit the city dead on. A record-breaking storm tied of 14 feet was recorded at The Battery in Manhattan, smashing the previous record of 10 feet.

Scenes of utter destruction like the one below were commonplace. Over 100 deaths were recorded, with areas like Staten Island’s east coast and the Rockaways particularly badly hit. The costs of the damage ran over $60 billion dollars. To this day, many people’s lives still have not returned to normal, many are still not able to move back into their homes.

On a personal level, I was very fortunate to be in a neighborhood that was left high and dry, and crucially with power. Along with thousands of other New Yorkers, I felt an urgent and compelling need to get out on the ground and help our neighbors who were hardest hit and who had lost so much. My wife, who had just started working at a new school, found out that week that one of her coworkers had been killed – crushed by a fallen tree – during the storm. My volunteer work after the storm took me to many areas of New York City that I had not explored before. I saw witnessed scenes that I will never forget. For me, this day will always entail with it a sense of grieving, and will alway serve as a reminder to remain vigilant, because the storm that we never thought would happen here did – and could again.