Re: Hurricane Sandy
Posted by Chris in Tampa on 2/17/2013, 6:11 am
You would have had riots over insurance. While some small land area might have received sustained hurricane force winds for a brief period while she was still at least somewhat tropical at the center, I'm not sure what you would call it in those areas. She was very much extratropical aside from just at the center not too far from landfall. By landfall of the center she was extratropical, but I think luckily for a lot of people it seems what it was at the time of the center's landfall is what matters for insurance. I think it was the extratropical nature that contributed most to the winds at that point on land and little from an inner core of a tropical cyclone. That New York reading was very far away and looking at estimated SFMR readings from recon, the wind field did not have winds like that from the center to as close to recon got to there. The reading seems unrelated to the expected wind field of the inner core. If you were to define a landfalling hurricane as any area of sustained hurricane force wind making landfall at the same time the inner core is still at least somewhat tropical, then perhaps she was a hurricane, but going by the landfall of the center I think is an easier metric. Plus, I'm not sure how you handle what was kind of like a hurricane inside an extratropical system. Sandy really had, for some time, definitive aspects of both, but I don't think the inner core of the hurricane actually touched land with sustained hurricane force winds. (With the wind highest at the center and then slowly getting lower and not increasing again which I think was due to its extratropical nature and not an outer eyewall being responsible which is the only thing I can really think of to explain higher winds further out) If the inner core had touched land with hurricane force winds in it, then it would be really weird to not be tropical at the actual landfall.
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Hurricane Sandy - jimw, 2/16/2013, 2:40 pm
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