The Life Cycle of Hurricane Sandy: Observations; Simulations; Operational Forecasts; Socioeconomic Impacts (INVITED)

Hurricane and post-hurricane Sandy was the tenth costliest Hurricane to strike the United States of America. In response to this devastating event, a research team of academic and government scientists rose to the challenge of preparing a contribution to the 2013 AMS Town Hall Meeting: Hurricane and Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy: Predictions, Warnings, Societal Impacts and Response. This lecture presents our most recent work which includes: i) a brief photo essay documenting the impact, government and humanitarian response to this catastrophe; ii) satellite loops of the storm's evolution; iii) operational and experimental numerical simulations/forecasts; iv) advanced Lagrangian visualizations of high-resolution ARW-WRF model simulations of the life cycle of Sandy. We will present ultra-high resolution simulations with the NCAR ARW-WRF prediction model run at 500-meter X 150 level resolution, over a domain encompassing 7,000 X 7, 000 computational grid points, using the NCAR VAPOR visualization system. The representativeness of these numerical simulations is evaluated with observations derived from, e.g., high-temporal RAPIDSCAN winds; ocean buoys; weather research and reconnaissance aircraft; conventional upper-air and surface observing systems.