Much
has been or will be written about Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy. The impacts are still being assessed and it
may be weeks before we have the full picture.
It was an historic and unprecedented storm. NASA has put together a wonderful video of
Sandy from its development as a tropical depression to its transformation to a
superstorm and finally a weaker system.
The time period covered here
is from October 23 to 31.
However,
an even better video covering the period October 25 to 31 was produced by NOAA
NESDIS. These rapid scan images were
produced into a time-lapse movie as an experiment using the GOES-14 image. The images are using visible light with a one
kilometer resolution.
Movie
credit: NOAA/CIMSS at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sandy
is too large a storm to be viewed entirely at this resolution. The view is centered on the central core and
extends out a few hundred miles. It
begins in the central Bahamas as a hurricane and transforms north of the
Bahamas as a hybrid storm. Finally,
Sandy makes a transition to extratropical just before making landfall on
October 29th.
This
is a fascinating view of the storm. I
hope you will appreciate the power being generated by Sandy. You can see the tops of thunderstorms
bubbling up through the cirrus overcast.
Sandy generated a tropical storm force wind field that was up to 1000
miles across at times. The central
pressure was so low that if it had been a pure hurricane it would have been a
category 4 storm. However, the transition
to a hybrid spread the winds over a much larger area preventing Sandy from
concentrating the winds near the center.
Enjoy!
