Hurricane
Sandy wasn't a "superstorm." Not because it wasn't
a "super" "storm," but because "superstorm" is an
imaginary scare-term that exists exclusively for
shock value.
Posted 11.01.2012 at 3:00 pm11 Comments
Superstorm? Robert
Simmon with data courtesy of the NASA/NOAA
GOES Project Science team
Superstorm [suːpər
ˈstɔrm]
Here is a short list of major news
organizations referring to Sandy as a
"superstorm": The L.A. Times, CBS News, Time, The Guardian, Business Insider, the Toronto Star, and the Wall Street Journal.
Here's what Professor Alan Blumberg,
professor of ocean engineering at the Stevens
Institute of Technology and director of its Center
for Maritime Systems, says a "superstorm" is:
"It's a media invention. There's no real
meteorological term called 'superstorm.'"
The storm we know as Sandy has gone by
several different classifications. Storm
classifications are fluid, just as the storms are:
what is a Category 3 hurricane in one part of the
world might be nothing but a cyclone by the time
it reaches another part. "You typically talk about
a storm's category depending on where you are,"
says Blumberg. Sandy was, according to the
Saffir-Simpson Category Scale (that's the scale
that decides what category a hurricane is, based
mostly on wind speed), a Category 2 hurricane when
it made landfall in Cuba, early on the morning of
October 25th. But when it made landfall near
Atlantic City, on the evening of the 29th, it was
a tropical cyclone, due to its reduced strength
from its trip up the coast. (Well, technically, it
was a "post-tropical cyclone," as it had ventured
out of the tropics but retained the wind speeds of
a tropical cyclone.) A hurricane is a specific
type of tropical cyclone, with sustained winds of
at least 74 mph. The Sandy that reached New Jersey
was not moving fast enough to retain its hurricane
status, so it was a mere tropical cyclone.
It gets even more complicated when we
talk about the storm that hit northern Appalachia
in West Virginia, western Virginia, and central
Pennsylvania. Sandy took an abrupt turn west and
south after it made landfall in New Jersey, which
means for those areas, Sandy was actually
classified as a nor'easter (it was coming from the
north and east, you see). So Sandy had lots of
names. But none of them was "superstorm."
On October 29th, Fox News ran a story called
"Hurricane Sandy: Five Reasons It's A Superstorm."
The reasons are indeed valid reasons why Sandy is
a very big and scary storm--the awful timing of
high tide, arctic air coming down from Canada,
that kind of thing. Mostly, the reason it feelsokay
to give Sandy this scary new name of "superstorm"
is that Sandy merged with an unusually cold storm
to its west which had been hurling early snows
down on West Virginia, forming one giant storm
that gave Sandy more power and also pushed it
west--very unusual for a tropical cyclone, says
Blumberg. So, two storms in one = superstorm,
right? Well, no. A super storm, perhaps, as in a
"very large or powerful" storm, but not a
superstorm. There's no such thing as a superstorm.
But the phrase "superstorm" took off,
perhaps because "post-tropical cyclone" sounds not
as scary. And, in the defense of those repeatedly
insisting on the superiority of this storm, it was
a very awful and destructive weather system! You
could make a reasonable argument that the term is
descriptive or evocative rather than scientific,
and you could make an argument that playing up the
super-ness of the storm served the function of
scaring people into protecting themselves. But
it's important not to pretend scary-sounding
words--or even silly words, like
"Frankenstorm"--are scientific classifications.
Sandy wasn't "downgraded from a hurricane to a
superstorm." Sandy was never a superstorm. There
are no superstorms.