Sandy’s Wrath May Mean Retirement

RIO GRANDE – The names read like a list of the most notorious – Carol, Hazel, Agnes, Bob, Camille, Andrew, Hugo, Floyd, Isabel, Katrina and Irene. Soon, though, the name ‘Sandy’, might be added to the list.
To date, the names of 76 hurricanes that have left their trail of havoc and destruction have been retired from use.
“I keep getting the question ‘Are they going to retire this name?’” said Dennis Feltgen a meteorologist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “I think it’s a foregone conclusion that that name will get retired.”
The decision to retire Sandy’s name will not be made until April when the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) convenes its meeting.
A decision to retire a name is made based on its impact, said Feltgen. “Names are retired by the sheer use of the name, or if the storm was so significant even the use of the name in the future would be totally inappropriate.”
According to a spokesperson for disaster modeling company EQECAT, losses in the Garden State from Hurricane Sandy have been set at between $3 to $6 billion. Fifty-five percent of those losses are to residential properties with commercial losses making up the other 45 percent.
The practice of naming storms started in 1951 when storms were named sequentially using the phonetic alphabet. Under that listing, the first storm of the year would be dubbed “Able.” Two years later the practice was abandoned and the United States began using alphabetical female names to distinguish storms. Male names were added to the lists of Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico storms in 1979.
The WMO lists the names of storms for six years. At the end of that period, names are recycled. Therefore, this year’s Hurricanes Alberto, Beryl and Chris will be rearing their head again in 2018.
Feltgen said Sandy’s name will be retired because of the devastation and impacts . “Names like Katrina and Andrew, they’re all retired. It is extremely likely Sandy’s name will be retired.”
In addition to being highly destructive, Sandy proved to be a unique storm meteorologically.
Storms typically come from the south to the north and move out, Feltgen said. “This storm came from the east/southeast and is extremely rare, especially this late in the year. This was one of those worse case scenarios where you have all this water piling up along the coastline and hurricane force winds.”
Unlike residents in more southern coastal states, Feltgen said many people along the mid-Atlantic seaboard had never experienced a hurricane.
The eye of the storm made land five miles south of Atlantic City, a few minutes past 8 p.m. Sandy’s maximum hurricane force sustained winds were clocked at 80 mph, which made the storm a Category 1-level hurricane.
Some called continued to call Sandy a hurricane; others opted to change dub her a superstorm.
“We didn’t do that,” said Feltgen. “Superstorm is a media term, not a meteorological term. It was a hurricane up until the center made landfall on the New Jersey coast.”
Feltgen explained a hurricane’s landfall is not established until the storm’s center is completely onshore. Once Sandy’s center arrived in the Garden State, she was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone.
Hurricanes have a tendency to downgrade themselves once hitting land, said the meteorologist. According to him, hurricanes feed off the heat energy from the ocean’s waters and lose strength was they lose their accessibility to water.
Sandy, however, was a different scenario; he said saying experts knew the hurricane would interact with other weather systems.
“We knew it would go post-tropical before it made landfall, said Feltgen.
The size of Sandy’s wind field was massive, said the meteorologist. “By the time it came ashore at its widest point, the tropical storm force winds extended out 820 miles across. That’s huge!”
Some media reports suggested the storm was 2,000 miles wide. Not so, said Feltgen.
“You can’t count the clouds, you have to go with the wind.”
Due to its size, meteorologists felt where the storm made landfall on the coastline.
“As far as the overall impacts on everybody, it wasn’t going to make the big of a difference because it was so large.”
Adding injury to insult was Sandy’s storm surge.
Feltgen said predictions about the storm surge came to fruition with the effects of the storm along with an astronomical full moon.
While here in Cape May County the back end of the storm’s offshore winds blew water out, New York didn’t fare so well.
“Winds were howling from the east and southeast,” said Feltgen, “so they got clobbered.”