Rare Weather Pattern over US — Moving East to West

[Junkdrawer]

33. BTW: Hurricane Sandy's Track Shows It Was A 1-In-700 Year Storm

Hurricane Sandy's devastating storm track is a rare one among hurricanes; a new statistical analysis estimates that the track of the storm — which took an unusual left-hand turn in the Atlantic before slamming into the East Coast — has an average probability of happening only once every 700 years.

"The particular shape of Sandy's trajectory is very peculiar, and that's very rare, on the order of once every 700 years," said Timothy Hall, a senior scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who co-authored the study. That means that in any particular year, the chance of such a storm track happening is 0.0014 percent.

The storm's near-perpendicular strike on the coast was a major factor in the severe flooding seen in New York, New Jersey and other nearby states, Hall added. But the rareness of the storm's track doesn't mean that the coast is safe from other severe storms. [Jersey Shore: Before & After Hurricane Sandy]

"We don't want to lead with the misimpression that we don't have to worry, [that] it's going to be 700 years until we have another surge. That's not true," Hall told LiveScience.

While Hall's initial research, detailed in the May 28 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, assumed a "steady state" system in which climate is not changing, he and others are also studying how climate change influences hurricane tracks. Those studies will help determine if the rarity of paths like the one Sandy took might change in a warming world.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/16/hurricane-sandy-track_n_3606456.html