Evolution of the Superstorm

As I read the news every day and monitor climate data from different parts of the world I cannot help but wonder when and how the superstorm will form. Its really not a question of if but rather when. More and more bizarre events are happening around the world. Massive floods, record snows, record heat, record cold, record tornados and record hurricanes.

Need fuel? Check out this SST anomaly map...

www.cdc.noaa.gov...

A bulk of the northern hemisphere is above normal. Much of the water is well above normal. Warm water is the fuel that drives the storms.

But what is it going to take to generate a superstorm event? El Nino years are famous for introducing large pacific storms. And years like this they can also lead to a prolonged zonal flow. Normally this isn't a bad thing. This keeps the bitter cold air trapped in Canada.

The problem will be when a gulf hurricane (late season : december) makes landfall in someplace like Texas. Landfalling storms are known for slowing down weather patterns. So you take a moisture rich storm and feed it into a strong pacific storm that is crossing the rockies and you how have a massive circulation able to draw the cold air down from Canada and reroute the jetstream. So now you feed bitter cold air into a slow moving, massive circulation that is super charged with gulf and pacific moisture. The dynamics of such a system should allow winds in the storm to rapidly intensify to hurricane force and dump snow across the country that will be measured in feet and not inches.

The storm itself may not be as shown in The Day After Tomorrow but it should be able to dump enough snow over a large enough area early in the season to cause a severe winter that may be difficult to overcome.

Your thoughts on this?

Indy,

Read the book "The Coming Global Superstorm" by Art Bell & Whitley Streiber. It's the book the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" is loosely based on. It explains a lot of what you are asking.

I've read the book and seen the movie.. and own the movie. lol. The movie is entertaining but full of holes. The book was good but I'm looking more at the events of a day that will unfold as the storm develops. I'm trying to think of a realistic scenario. I can't imagine a supercell doing what the movie claims and I think what the book hints at. When I think of supercell I think of a single storm that covers the area of maybe 4 counties. Not something that covers most of the US. Then again maybe im missing the point.

The "storm of the century" back in 1993 tapped into gulf moisture. I'm thinking it actually came across the gulf before moving up the coast. It could have been much worse had it been in december instead of march. The big october snow of 1989 was caused by a storm coming up from the gulf. If memory serves me well I believe the blizzard of 78 was the result of two systems merging. This leads me to think that the superstorm may form in much the same way.

I don't know. Maybe this is something I don't really want to find the answer to

I live in Georgia. Should I buy a generator? My power was out for almost a week when we had that big blizzard years ago.
Or do you think it's just going to be a really cold winter in general for all over the country?

Well if you have the means to get one it never hurts to have a generator. But as far as this winter goes who knows. We had one of the coolest summers on record. Where I live we didn't once hit 90 degrees and that never happened. October started out cool but that was basically it. This split flow is making it difficult to predict the rest of the winter. The computer models have having a hard time with anything beyond a few days right now.

Originally posted by Indy
The "storm of the century" back in 1993 tapped into gulf moisture. I'm thinking it actually came across the gulf before moving up the coast.

Interestingly this storm of the century, or the noname storm as we called it in Florida was merely a cold front pushing south that surpassed everyone's expectations in strength. It came down SE through the gulf and smacked central florida. It caught us all by surprise, and the weather people in Florida have never made light of anything since.

I don't see how people were caught off guard. Perhaps the people on the west coast who experienced a storm surge. But this low pressure system was forecasted days in advance to be a massive storm. It was forecasted in advance to be historic. I was living on the space coast of Florida when it it. It was an impressive system but I don't recall hearing about anyone being caught off guard by it. At least not the March 93 system. Now I can't say the same for the severe tornado outbreak that Florida experience a few years or so afterwards. The worst tornados in state history were observed including one that was an F4 or F5. Don't remember which it was.

Originally posted by Indy
The computer models have having a hard time with anything beyond a few days right now.

Yeah, there should have been two warms weeks in July... instead there was record class floods...
But SE direction has often fooled meteorologist.


Here's some more stuff from little same kind thing, Halloween storm of 1991 which is also called perfect storm.

Another destructive northeaster struck the Atlantic coast in late October 1991 and therefore is known as the Halloween storm...
The Halloween storm began as an extratropical disturbance that was later reinforced when it merged with the remnants of Hurricane Grace.

pubs.usgs.gov...

Here's very good explanation:

On October 28, 1991, a extratropical cyclone developed along a cold front which had moved off the Northeast coast of the U.S. By 1800 UTC, this low was located a few hundred miles east of the coast of Nova Scotia. With strong upper air support, the low rapidly deepened and became the dominant weather feature in the Western Atlantic. Hurricane Grace, which had formed on October 27 from a pre-existing subtropical storm and was initially moving northwestward, made a hairpin turn to the east in response to the strong, westerly deep-layer mean flow on the southern flank of the developing extratropical low.

As the low pressure continued to deepen on October 29, Grace became only a secondary contributor to the phenomenal sea conditions which developed over the Western Atlantic during the next few days. At 1800 UTC on the 29th, the vigorous cold front from the extratropical low undercut and quickly destroyed Grace's low level circulation east of Bermuda (Note the red and yellow area east of Charleston, SC in Figure 1). The remnant mid- and upper-level moisture from Grace became caught up in the outer part of the extratropical storm center's circulation, far from the storm's center. By the next day these remnants had become indistinguishable. The center of the extratropical low drifted southeastward and then southwestward, deepening all the time. It reached peak intensity of 972 mb and maximum sustained winds of 60 knots at 1200 UTC on October 30, when it was located about 340 n mi south of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
...
The southward motion of the cyclone on October 31 had brought the storm over a section of the Gulfstream with sea surface temperatures near 26 degrees C (80 degrees F). Convection began increasing in bands near the center and it is estimated that subtropical characteristics were acquired at 1800 UTC on October 31, setting the stage for a bizarre ending to this storm (See Figure 3).
By 0600 UT on November 1, central convection had increased to the point where a tropical cyclone (estimated to be of tropical storm intensity) could be identified within the central area of the low (See Figure 4). Later it became a true hurricane in every sense of the word.

www.ncdc.noaa.gov...
www.ncdc.noaa.gov...

www.islandnet.com...
www.usatoday.com...
www.hurricanehunters.com...

Originally posted by Indy
I don't see how people were caught off guard. Perhaps the people on the west coast who experienced a storm surge. But this low pressure system was forecasted days in advance to be a massive storm. It was forecasted in advance to be historic. I was living on the space coast of Florida when it it. It was an impressive system but I don't recall hearing about anyone being caught off guard by it. At least not the March 93 system. Now I can't say the same for the severe tornado outbreak that Florida experience a few years or so afterwards. The worst tornados in state history were observed including one that was an F4 or F5. Don't remember which it was.

You're right Indy....I remember them forecasting that storm on the Weather Channel more than a week early, and it was receiving MASSIVE coverage the entire time.....Everyone was talking about it....Ended up that over 200 people died from that storm!!

Well, I was living in Tampa at the time, and had already quit smoking pot in college so I'm pretty certain on what I remember.

The west coast meteorologists were not making that storm out to be a big deal. Some coastal flooding was predicted, and we instead had roof-level flooding. There was lots of blame going around afterwards. People complained on camera they were not warned of a spring storm of this magnitude. Whether that's simple BS rationalization following their loss or not I don't know. I also know that if we were aware of its potential we would have been on the gulf coast somewhere watching the storm instead of at USF in an apartment watching Beavis and Butthead.