Hurricane Sandy a 1-in-700-Year Event Says NASA Study 148
Rebecka writes "Hurricane Sandy, which pelted multiple states in Oct. and created billions of dollars in damage, was a freak occurrence and not an indication of future weather patterns, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies via LiveScience. The study (abstract), which calculated a statistical analysis of the storm's trajectory and monitored climate changes' influences on hurricane tracks, claims that the tropical storm was merely a 1-in-700-year event. 'The particular shape of Sandy's trajectory is very peculiar, and that's very rare, on the order of once every 700 years,' said senior scientist at NASA and study co-author, Timothy Hall. According to Hall, the extreme flooding associated with the storm was also due to the storm's trajectory which was described as being 'near perpendicular.' The storm's unusual track was found to have been caused by a high tides associated with a full moon and high pressure that forced the storm to move off the coast of the Western North Atlantic."
The problem with Probability... (Score:3, Insightful)
... is that it is possible to flip a coin and have it land heads up 1,000 times consecutively - it can happen and is increasingly likely to happen in a larger number of trials. Same can be said for a "Sandy" occurring in consecutive (or near neighbor) years. One thing is evident - the east coast, sand bars, outer banks, etc, were formed and shaped by this type of storm. I expect the 700 year estimate is fanciful.
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Sandy hit at high tide and a full moon
the gravity of the moon raised the water a few feet which is why the storm surge caused all the flooding
we had a more powerful storm hit NYC the year before and it did a lot less damage because it didn't hit at high tide. very minor flooding.
for another hurricane to do as much damage as Sandy, it has to hit the around the 22nd of the month and make landfall close to 8pm
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Sandy hit at high tide and a full moon the gravity of the moon raised the water a few feet which is why the storm surge caused all the flooding
we had a more powerful storm hit NYC the year before and it did a lot less damage because it didn't hit at high tide. very minor flooding.
for another hurricane to do as much damage as Sandy, it has to hit the around the 22nd of the month and make landfall close to 8pm
...and be at least as strong. I know it's convenient to leave out meaningful factors that don't really support your assertion, but the force of the storm kinda counts, don't you think?
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sandy was barely a category 1 hurricane, very weak
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It was a Category 1 Hurricane with Category 2 damage. It hit at high tide with a full moon and it met up with another storm system that was already over the northeast. Take a ride around NJ or the south shore of Long Island or Staten Island and tell me again that it was weak. Also remember that most of the people affected JUST got their homes/lives straigthened out from Irene 13 months prior.
Re:The problem with Probability... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not the politically correct answer. You are supposed to blame Sandy on global warming.
Mind you, that may be the scientifically correct answer too. I certainly don't have the background to make that judgment. And I am definitely not a global warming naysayer by any means.
But if you publish a study saying Sandy was due only to various things other than global warming, I think you're in politically dangerous territory, even if the study is an honest one.
Of course, this defines the problem. When science is politicized, no good comes of it.
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No, the politically correct answer is to blame Sandy on Obamacare.
I liked it better when the stock culprit was "all them nucular power plants."
Re:The problem with Probability... (Score:4, Informative)
it has to hit the around the 22nd of the month and make landfall close to 8pm
That would be valid only for this month, as the tides don't follow a monthly cycle but a ~ 28-day cycle.
Re:The problem with Probability... (Score:5, Informative)
This article
Superstorm Sandy packed more total energy than Hurricane Katrina at landfall [washingtonpost.com]
does a good job explaining.
Long story short, discount Saffir-Simpson categories and look at IKE when you want to discuss surge.
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> Sandy hit at high tide and a full moon
*AND* there was a big fat blocking high sitting in the Atlantic, blocking the standard north-eastward track a post-tropical storm usually takes, forcing it westward. That's 3 independandant variables that had to coincide just so. It was a case of extreme bad luck.
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Sandy hit at high tide and a full moon
the gravity of the moon raised the water a few feet which is why the storm surge caused all the flooding
we had a more powerful storm hit NYC the year before and it did a lot less damage because it didn't hit at high tide. very minor flooding.
for another hurricane to do as much damage as Sandy, it has to hit the around the 22nd of the month and make landfall close to 8pm
Which sounds like as good a time and date to make landfall.
Where I grew up they'd describe a severe flood as happening once, every 70 years. I'm not 70 years old and another one has already happened.
I used to commute through a riverside neighborhood where the late-September Spring High Tide combined with the end-of-summer monsoon and the river would flow up through the storm drains and into the streets. Businesses would sandbag their front doors. Several years back, they finally decided to put in pumps to handle the annual event.
Never underestimate the power of multiple weather systems ganging up on you.
Re:The problem with Probability... (Score:4)
The number of "100 year" weather events in the past decode or so has sorta turned into a running joke for comedians. At some point, you should probably decide that either the previous methods of estimating such things were wrong, or the weather patterns have changed in recent years.
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At some point, you should probably decide that either the previous methods of estimating such things were wrong, or the weather patterns have changed in recent years.
There are other ways humans can change that. For example, flood control made flooding events more extreme by not giving the water a place to go. Forest fires were made more extreme by many decades of aggressive wildfire fighting.
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The entire East Coast does not have the same probability of getting hit by a hurricane. The Outer Banks get nailed almost every decade. The Jersey shore? The chance of getting hit each season is approximately 1 in 200. That said, one hit in 1903 and another in 1944. Then you have Sandy. So over the last 100 years, it looks more like once every 40-60 years (based on a whole 3 data points). Check out the risk maps. [globaldatavault.com]
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You know, 700 years ago the Indians were burning lots of fires to send smoke signals. Obviously they caused a climate change that brought the "Sandy" like hurricanes to their shores back then.
Anyway, it's all bullshit. Everybody knows that hurricanes are caused by gays who want to marry horses, or Protestants, take your pick [mcgill.ca]...
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You know, 700 years ago the Indians were burning lots of fires to send smoke signals. Obviously they caused a climate change that brought the "Sandy" like hurricanes to their shores back then.
Somewhere around 13,000 years ago the last glacial age ended, in effect the Earth has been warming prior and is accelerating today, which means weather patterns are changing. To mark 1 in 700 seems almost casually to overlook this relatively short time span and what has transpired within.
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You aren't understanding where they came up with this statistic. Each of the inputs that make this storm unique are their own 'dice'... these probabilities are then combined to estimate the probability of another storm like Sandy will occur- once every 700 years.
What is the problem again? And why would it be increasingly likely?
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What is NASA gonna say if another 'Sandy' hits again... in the next 5 years? No, I'm not predicting there will be one within 5 years. I'm just wondering what they'd do if it did occur very soon?
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I think he means that if you flip it 50 million times, the odds are better for that 1000-heads sequence to show up at some point than if you flip it 5000 times. That said, I don't really see how that's applicable to hurricanes, except perhaps if we're getting more hurricanes per year then it's more likely that a given hurricane will emulate Sandy?
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Plus it's not really a 50/50 chance another Sandy will occur. Several different factors have to all line up. Each one of those could have a 50/50 chance of occurring. So comparing a coin flip to another Sandy hitting isn't really a good comparison. Take a 20 sided die [wikipedia.org] and roll it 50 million times and see what the chances of rolling a 5 1000 times in a row.
Re:The problem with Probability... (Score:5, Informative)
False. 0.5^1000 == 0.5^1000 no matter how many trials there are
Your right of course. But he's saying the longer you flip a coin, the more likely you will see an occurrence of 1000 heads in a row, and this is true.
Lets look at a smaller set 2 heads in a row:
The odds when flipping a coin twice is 0.5^2. or 1 in 4.
The odds when flipping a coin twice more is again 1 in 4.
repeat ad nauseum, which is your argument.
His observation is that if you flip it 3 times, the odds of two heads coming up in a row increases, and it does. It's now 3 in 8 which is greater than 1 in 4. If you flip it 4 times... its up to 8 in 16 (or 50%), 5 times, and your odds get to 19/32 which is almost 60%, 6 times 51/64 (almost 80%).
That doesn't change the odds of a superstorm happening next year, or next week. Its still a 1 in 700 year probability. But the thing about statistically unlikely things is not only that they can happen, but that they DO happen, and over a long enough period unlikely things are nearly inevitable.
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Saying that the particular trajectory of Sandy is relatively infreque
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Except the models claim that arctic zones should warm more than the equatorial zones, so that should reduce the amount of energy available to power storms.
Re:your math (Score:2)
If I heat the polar regions (more than?) the tropics, how will this reduce the energy warming the tropics?
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Storms are essentially heat engines, but they do not run on the differential between the poles and the equator, they run on the differential between the surface and the upper reaches of the troposphere.
Given that, I see no mechanism for polar warming to offset warming of the oceans in the tropical zone.
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Perhaps without so much polar differential, they can linger and pick up/drop more rain along the way. ;)
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I agree, people have already forgotten about Katrina it seems. And there are other models that imply that weather SHOULD be different as the earth moves from ice age to ice age. Sounds like a "keep calm" statement from the government so we don't lose sleep over what's to come.
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Even less certain are changes in hurricane tracks due to climate. As the Arctic warms up, some scientists suggest the temperature difference between higher and lower latitudes will drop and weaken the jet stream, making storms less likely to follow this stream out into the Atlantic.
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In fact, the only use I can see for this research is to provide an easy talking point for extreme weather advocates. Sandy was a 1 in 700 year hurricane therefore extreme weather from "climate change" is real.
Once in a Hundred-Year storm... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's funny because the year BEFORE Sandy, we had a "Once in a Hundred Year Storm" hit the northeast. And then next year, the exact same thing happened again, but it was worse.
And this year, I expect the weatherman to say the exact same thing....
Re:Once in a Hundred-Year storm... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are conflating what NASA said with something your local weatherman may have said.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "the Northeast". That's a really big region, with some parts susceptible to hurricanes and some not. Sandy was the first real strike on most of the New Jersey coast since 1944, for instance. It was also a colossal storm - the largest recorded if memory serves. The year before, there was Irene which hit Coney Island. While there were overlapping areas of damage, for the most part Irene caused flooding to inland areas, whereas Sandy really punched coastal areas. Irene barely scra
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The local weatherman has a computer that they use to access NOAA data. Maybe a barometer hanging on the wall. That's about it. They have become rip and read jockeys just like the news guys.
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I don't think I'm confusing NASA and NOAA. I was pointing out the flaw in the logic of:
"A" told me x, but I don't believe "A" because "B" was wrong.
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Re:Once in a Hundred-Year storm... (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's 100 different low probability events, then there's a decent chance of any two of those happening in consecutive years. Unless there's some correlation between the two that makes them unlikely to happen together, it's no more special than any other coincidence.
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hurricane irene was not a once in a 100 year storm, not even close
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not only was Irene not a power storm, in NY state it did the most damage after it lost hurricane strength. it was a slow moving storm and dumped a lot of rain in westchester county washing out a lot of railroad tracks
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That's funny because the year BEFORE Sandy, we had a "Once in a Hundred Year Storm" hit the northeast. And then next year, the exact same thing happened again, but it was worse.
And this year, I expect the weatherman to say the exact same thing....
Irene was indeed as powerful as Sandy and happened only one year previous, but not as big a storm area-wise, and did not hit perpendicular on a full moon at high tide. Thus, it did relatively minor damage.
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That depends on where you were and what you consider damage. Irene was much worse here in Connecticut in terms of wind effects (downed trees on roads/houses/etc) than Sandy. Several hours later as the storm moved north, flooding in southern Vermont was horrible and the effects still being felt 2 years later.
The wind effects were exacerbated by the fact that Irene hit in August - late summer - when trees and plants had full foliage. Lots of trees came down as a result - if you were lucky they didn't fall
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Personally, in my NJ suburban area Sandy hit us a lot worse than either Irene or that freak snow storm around Halloween 2011.
I don't remember much about Irene actually. I think we were without power at my parents house for like a 2-3 days but some co-workers were pushing a week. Some were without water, but in my case I was just mildly inconvenienced. And gas wasn't that hard to find.
A few months later we had the freak snow storm around Halloween. The leaves were still on the trees due to a mild autumn
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Indeed - I wish that, instead of just saying "most expensive storm ever!" they would normalize it somehow - perhaps to something like cost relative to annual mean salary per unit population density. This way you'd weed out all the effects of inflation and higher concentrations of development.
Perhaps mean salary isn't the correct metric -
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I think you misunderstand what the 10, 50, and 100 year storms refer to.
So what happens ... (Score:1)
So, if we get another one like these in our lifetime, what then?
NASA just says oops and people keep pretending like there isn't climate change happening?
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if you look at wikipedia, NYC gets hit by Category 3 storms once every 70 years on average. Sandy was barely a Cat 1 when it hit us.
the last one was in 1938. 135 mph winds when the storm made landfall at Long Island. we are actually overdue for a very powerful storm here
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The entire US is overdue for a Category 3, not just New York.
A quick google search...
http://images.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&q=category+3+landfall+USA [google.com]
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bJhUmJyxrQs/ULy7NL1QbAI/AAAAAAAACQw/RlSJLqrsz5Y/s1600/hurrdrou0613.jpg [blogspot.com]
looks promising.
Anyway. Pretty obv been awfully lucky recently.
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"Sandy was barely a Cat 1 when it hit us."
True, if you look at it in a very simplistic fashion, i.e wind speed only. However, if you look at it in terms of size, Sandy was a MONSTER, and it hit in conjunction with another weather system of hard weather.
The total energy potential of Sandy, due to sheer size, was greater than quite a few Cat 3's etc.
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As I recall Sandy was a tropical storm when it hit.
Found a pic of Sandy
http://en.es-static.us/upl/2012/10/Hurricane-Sandy-on-October-29-2012.jpg [es-static.us]
Compared to...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg/932px-Tropical_storm_irene_aug_27_2011_at_1059_est.jpg [wikimedia.org]
The size doesn't seem that dramatic.
So. Not sure what the monster part was. Apart from, ofc, the fact that it hit at an unusually high tide.
I believe most of the damage was storm surge, not du
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Erm. Right. Point of pic, really, was that as hurricanes fall apart into tropical storms, they are almost always huge things that cover like most of the east coast.
Compared to pics of hurricanes falling apart into a tropical storm as they track up the coast that I recall and could find of the past, Sandy seems pretty typical.
The dramatic part was the high tide and pushing that storm surge up against New York City which was woefully unprepared despite warnings in the past (shades of Katrina).
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Seriously, look at those pics again... And compare the scale of the pictures themselves... Then you'll see that Sandy absolutely dwarfed Irene... Hint: In the Sandy pic, the scale is such that you see a sizeable portion of Florida.. The Irene pic, you have the Norfolk area as the southernmost part...
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http://m8y.org/tmp/temp.jpeg [m8y.org]
A rough approximation of shapes, as near as I can make out from landmarks.
Sandy is larger, but, doesn't seem to be that much larger to me.
And, as noted in comment to AC, my experience of Sandy in maryland was *very* different from that of people in NJ and NY (as in, barely felt like a tropical storm in the impact on our counties in terms of power loss and damage).
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I guess I should say, didn't even feel like a...
Anyway. Sandy was definitely spread over a large area, which helped diffuse it further.
You can talk about total energy, but if the storm is spread over the entire continent, it isn't very interesting.
Most places make clear the storm surge was the worst damage, and that would certainly have been helped by having been spread out, while, the results inland would have been significantly less.
The need for storm surge protection for New York City had been known for
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So I measured the two pics in google maps for an approximate estimate of what to my eyeball looked like two pretty big storms, only Irene with a more definite central eye.
From the bottom of Sandy to the top (where, admittedly there's clearly a bit of weak storm cropped, but Irene is clearly a lot wider and more of a spiral, so would win on width)
versus
From the bottom of Irene to the top of the pic.
Both were (very approximately) ~915 miles from top to bottom in those pics.
From the far left of the storm sweep
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People who constantly blame everything on climate change - even events like hurricanes, where there is no scientific consensus on the matter - are as big a problem as the "I don't believe in global warming" crowd.
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Well, the problem with that statement is that except for the "I do not believe in global warming" crowd, there's an awful lot of scientific [nasa.gov] consensus [ca.gov] on the topic.
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Agreed. One of the other posters pointed out that Sandy did as much damage as it did in part because of the effect of the moon and the tides. Now, I'm no climate scientist, but I was completely unaware that global warming was affecting the moon's gravitational pull.
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Anecdotally speaking, I think that meteorological records are being broken at an unprecedented historical level. Just what I've noticed, and I have been fooled by evidence in the past.
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i've lived in NYC on and off for over 30 years and this is my 3rd hurricane
gloria in 1986 or so
irene in 2011
sandy
lots of hurricanes hit NYC usually every few years. its quite normal
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Then we had some bad luck. Or God hates us. You pick.
You can't mitigate every single potential risk, you have to look at the odds of a given risk occurring and prioritize response based on that.
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Maybe you should visit the source, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies http://www.giss.nasa.gov/ [nasa.gov] and see if you think this particular branch of NASA is soft pedaling global warming.
It's been James E. Hansen personal pulpit for the last 30 years.
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I have to commend GISS on this analysis. I would be to their advantage to say:
Climate Change Caused Hurricane Sandy!!!
But they took the data, and analyzed it and came to a scientifically sound conclusion that it was not purely a Climate Change caused event.
This is exactly how things should be done.
Also, the next time people get all up in arms saying:
This huge cold weather snap is proof against Climate Change!!
GISS can study that too and prove that no, the cold snap in one particular large region has nothin
Re:So what happens ... (Score:4, Insightful)
So, if we get another one like these in our lifetime, what then? NASA just says oops and people keep pretending like there isn't climate change happening?
One supposes that with new data the NASA scientists would revise their theories. If NASA's models are broken, then attack the models. Short of that, data-less speculation is just that.
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If NASA's models are broken, then attack the models. Short of that, data-less speculation is just that.
The (re)insurance industry has more or less admitted that its statistical models are broken and that "1 in X00 years" is a meaningless metric based on information that is no longer relevant.
The future trend is for the insurance industry to require mitigation for extreme weather events or you won't get (cheap or any) insurance.
https://www.google.com/search?q=it+is+rather+obvious+that,+for+many+regions,+hazard+risk+can+no+longer+be+seen+as+stationary [google.com]
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These estimates are not based on counting the number of storms that actually occur, they are based on simulations of storm paths.
The probability that another one of these happens in our lifetime is about 10%.
The probability that another once-in-700-year event happens somewhere in the US even just next year is nearly 100%, since there are many more than 700 sites that keep and report these statistics. In different words, you expect multiple extreme weather events to be reported in the US every year.
Does that
weather change (Score:1)
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RTFA
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Does that take into account that the weather has changed due to climate change (global warming) and these rare events will become more probable in this new climate?
Depends on how you calculate probable.
Storms are actually predicted to be fewer in number, but more intense. http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/201303_storms/ [nasa.gov]
The rest of the story (Score:1)
TFTFY.
climate change deniers! (Score:2)
Those evil climate change deniers at NASA are up to their old tricks again!
That's just for that one type of storm (Score:2)
700 years? (Score:2)
700 years seems oddly specific. I wonder how that was worked out. It isn't like we have any real reliable date past say 100 years for example. How are they extrapolating 700 years statistically?
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I guess I mean, I get like 100, 500 being a round number or 1000. But 700? Just seems odd to me.
To my mind someone did a very useless statistical calculation, got a number like every 723.7654358 years, said 700, and called it a day.
The point being if it really was a round number say 1000 years, one could make a reasonable interpretation of accuracy (which would be very little). By saying 700 they seem to be trying to give it more credibility than it is worth, which I call BS.
A lot of time particularly stati
Ob. XKCD (Score:2)
http://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
Understanding probability (Score:5, Insightful)
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...not to mention what they are predicting- Sandy was hardly considered a category 1 hurricane when it hit, but it was very large and came ashore at an odd angle.
Smaller much more powerful (higher winds) storms have hit the coast in the last century.
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Lets not fall into the Gambler's fallacy [wikipedia.org].
Yes. And add to that that the earth's atmospheric-oceanic system is not currently in a steady state (with unchanging boundary conditions or unchanging time-averaged conditions), and the idea of any XXX-year storm becomes even less useful.
But But (Score:2)
if it happens every 700 years then how can we blame global warming?
I think the key is if 1 in 700 year events start happening every second Tuesday, then I might be convinced.
Last 700 years: yes, future: not so much (Score:3, Interesting)
These records get broken as a matter of routine these days in exactly the way climate sciences has predicted for quite a while now: Things get more extreme and less stable is the main prediction. So while Sandy may have been once in 700 years for the past, it could well be 1 in 50 years or even worse in the future.
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Utter nonsense, no records broken at all by storms on historic scale. No evidence of more frequent nor more powerful tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts nor anything else. The worst storms and droughts have not occurred in the past decade, that's a fact.
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Keep telling yourself that....
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Le sigh.
From a recent WMO report [wmo.int] titled "2001-2010, A Decade of Climate Extremes":
Terry Pratchett sez (Score:3)
Yeah, but to paraphrase Terry Pratchett, everyone knows that a 1 in 700 year chance occurs nine times out of ten.
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And 1 in 700 is the statistical figure, you can have one every year for 10 years and then no serious storms for the next 7000 years.
What is important is to realize that humans don't have much to put up against nature when it's doing the worst it can. The only thing to do is to be prepared for bad events. Construct a survival kit that you can use when the time comes. At least if you live in an area where nature can make a serious impact.
Thanks NASA! (Score:2)
The NASA paper bears no resemblance to the summary (Score:5, Informative)
The NASA paper does not say that Sandy was not influenced by climate change. What they actually calculate is that Sandy-like hurricanes occur once in 700 years under pre-industrial conditions. Here is one of many relevant quotes:
Someone should have RTFA.
Guaranteed to be Misinterpreted... (Score:2)
...as a claim that storms as damaging as Sandy occur in this area with only a 1-in-700-year probability. As the article says, however, this was an unusual storm in a number of ways, and a more conventional storm causing at least as much damage is more probable than a repeat of Sandy.
Vocabulary (Score:2)
We have such an opportunity to expand our vocabulary - new words, like haboob, and dericho.
bad statistics (Score:3)
Hurricanes with Sandy's characteristics may have always been, for example, 1 in a century hurricanes due to dynamics that the stochastic model above completely fails to anticipate. But we had so little data that this is the first one we have seen with these characteristics.
Second, we are ignoring the consequences of observation bias. Given the many hurricanes that have happened, I bet we'll find that most have tracks that would be similarly infrequent. Consider the case of flipping a fair coin ten times. No matter what the outcome of heads and tails in sequence, it will be a 1 in 1,024 event. There are a fair number of hurricanes that hit the mid-Atlantic states. Each one may take an infrequent path. I see nothing unusual in hurricane Sandy being rare or for that matter not particularly rare.
Where did they get 700 years of weather data? (Score:2)
Assuming you believe in climate 'science' ... (Score:2)
... really, _700 years_ of records? And the margin of error on those early 'records' would be? And the margins of error on your model's assumptions would be? Oh, and did all your models agree on this or were they in agreement +/- some margin?
Vague hand waving at best, attempt to placate/influence at worst.
What should have been said, "We _guess_ that _maybe_ it was a 1 in 700 hundred-ish year-ish event. But that could be totally wrong. Thanks for listening."
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What a wonderful time to be alive! All of these outrageous and unusual happenings!
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You are missing knowledge about what the phase of the moon is, and how it applies. Tides are more complicated than "follow the moon" because the ocean/sea floor has considerable impact. But the thing with tidal forces isn't that the size changes, but that the distance changes. That is, tidal force is the differential between two points and that is a function of distance. If its night and the moon is full it is closer to you than when its night and it is a new moon (e.g., already set and on the other side of
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I thought the main thing about the phases of the moon was to do with the sun-earth-moon angle - higher tides when the moon and sun are opposed or in conjunction, lower tides when they're at 90 degrees to each other in the sky*.
*roughly
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I described how tidal forces work and how distance varies that. IIRC (I haven't read anything on the topic in years) the sun has greater tidal force than the moon, but traditionally people always say the moon and historically sailors have often viewed the moon as special.
With respect to moon/sun opposed or in conjuction that would be full moon and new moon respectively, with the 90 degree points the quarter moons. GP wondered why, if the moon's size (mass, I'm assuming was meant) that anything changed. Dist