Huge combo storm may pummel East Coast next week

Waves brought by Hurricane Sandy crash on house in eastern Kingston, Jamaica, Wednesday. Sandy's remnants could combine with winter storm and blast of frigid air to bring hybrid super storm to East Coast next week, forecasters say. / AP Photo/Collin Reid

WASHINGTON Much of the U.S. East Coast has a good chance of getting blasted by gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and maybe even snow early next week by an unusual hybrid of hurricane and winter storm, federal and private forecasters say.

Though still projecting several days ahead of Halloween week, the computer models are spooking meteorologists. Government scientists said Wednesday the storm has a 70 percent chance of smacking the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

Hurricane Sandy in the Caribbean, an early winter storm in the West, and a blast of arctic air from the North are predicted to collide, sloshing and parking over the country's most populous coastal corridor starting Sunday. The worst of it should peak early Tuesday, but it will stretch into midweek, forecasters say.

"It'll be a rough couple days from Hatteras up to Cape Cod," said forecaster Jim Cisco of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction center in College Park, Md. "We don't have many modern precedents for what the models are suggesting."

It is likely to hit during a full moon, when tides are near their highest, increasing coastal flooding potential, NOAA forecasts warn. And with some trees still leafy and the potential for snow, power outages could last to Election Day, some meteorologists fear. They say it has all the earmarks of a billion-dollar storm.

Some have compared it to the so-called Perfect Storm that struck off the coast of New England in 1991, but Cisco said that one didn't hit as populated an area and is not comparable to what the East Coast may be facing. Nor is it like last year's Halloween storm, which was merely an early snowstorm in the Northeast.

This has much more mess potential because it is a combination of different storm types that could produce a real whopper of weather problems, meteorologists say.

"The Perfect Storm only did $200 million of damage and I'm thinking a billion," said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private service Weather Underground. "Yeah, it will be worse."

But this is several days in advance, when weather forecasts are far less accurate. The National Hurricane Center only predicts five days in advance, and on Wednesday its forecasts had what's left of Sandy off the North Carolina coast on Monday. But the hurricane center's chief hurricane specialist, James Franklin, said the threat keeps increasing for "a major impact in the Northeast, New York area. In fact, it would be such a big storm that it would affect all of the Northeast."

The forecasts keep getting gloomier and more convincing with every day, several experts said.

Cisco said the chance of the storm smacking the East jumped from 60 percent to 70 percent on Wednesday. Masters was somewhat skeptical on Tuesday, giving the storm scenario just a 40 percent likelihood, but on Wednesday he also upped that to 70 percent. The remaining computer models. which previously hadn't shown the merger and mega-storm formation, now predict a similar scenario.

The biggest question mark is snow, and that depends on where the remnants of Sandy turn inland. The computer model that has been leading the pack in predicting the hybrid storm has it hitting around Delaware. But another model has the storm hitting closer to Maine. If it hits Delaware, the chances of snow increase in that region. If it hits farther north, chances for snow in the mid-Atlantic and even up to New York are lessened, Masters said.

NOAA's Cisco said he could see the equivalent of several inches of snow or rain in the mid-Atlantic, depending on where the storm ends up. In the mountains, snow may be measured in feet instead of inches.

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The National Hurricane Center's forcast discussion (#12) as of 5AM EDT basically says that she will head north-northwest after churning through the Bahamas and is expected to be a stone's throw from the Atlantic Seaboard during her entire romp up the coast.
Yesterday the GFS, a very reliable model, indicated Sandy would turn sharply rightward right about now and head into the open Atlantic. That she shows no sign of doing so tells me that's not likely to happen and, in fact, the GFS has changed its tune and now says Sandy will his the U.S. Mainland somewhere northeast of Portland, Maine as a strong nor'easter.
The European still believes Sandy will crash ashore somewhere between Hatteras and New York City, but since we're still five days out any statement further defining the bullseye would not be appropriate.
In any case, it looks like Sandy will annoy the U.S. mainland somewhere and if some of the more dire predictions mentioned in this article bear out could cause a lot more grief in terms of life loss and property damage here than in the Caribbean....