Sandy explodes overnight & eyes the East Coast

BALTIMORE - Mike Masco

ABC 2 BALTIMORE

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Sandy certainly over performed expectations last night as the storm dropped to an impressive 954 millibars, making it the strongest storm of the 2012 season! Sandy is battling the mountainous areas over eastern Cuba this morning before emerging as a Hurricane over the southern Bahamas by Thursday afternoon.

Tropical storm warnings continue for the east coast of Florida while hurricane warning have been issued for all of the grand Bahamas in preparation for Sandy's arrival.

The question is where does it go from there?

The Setup:

A deep trough or cold front (commonly referred to)  will move through the Ohio Valley by Saturday morning as Sandy moves over the northern Bahamas.

As this cold front pushes east, Sandy will begin to interact with it in a way that forces her North somewhere between 50 - 200 miles south east of the North Carolina coastline. As the cold front intensifies it will becoming  negatively tilted in response to a huge blocking pattern over the northern Atlantic. In a situation involving a negative tiled trough, storms have a tendency to move back towards the coast and sucked inland. It is a very complex situation that is tough to forecast days in advance.

Our forecast models show the storm coming back ashore between Maine and Maryland with the correct solution being somewhere between them.

 

 

The two more trusted models in the business are the GFS and European which you have heard us talk a lot about! The GFS for the last several days has taken Sandy offshore and out to sea. This morning's model now takes the storm out to sea and drives it back into the coast somewhere over the northern New England region.

While this solution has been accepted by many as correct, I believe we see numerous errors with it and inconsistencies run to run is alarming. Little support favors this solution among our computer guidance and it remains to be seen whether this would ever happen given the pattern we have in place!

The second model that we have mentioned in our forecast is the European model. This model continues to remain consistant on a run to run basis showing a storm much further south, stronger, and a major coastal problem. The differences are astounding!

 

 

Here is the model breakdown from various models we use

European landfall: Delmarva/ NJ
GFS Landfall: Eastern New England
Canadian Landfall: Long Island
NOGAPS landfall: eastern Maryland
NAM landfall: not in range but closest to the European

GFLD (Tropical model) : Delaware/ Maryland.

The end result will be determined we hope in the next 24 hours as the government will do a massive launch of weather balloons across the country. The hope is to add more data to the models to better figure out where Sandy will go and which solution is correct!

More later ..