MARACOOS Blog

Heading Towards New England

nstrands — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 16:59:28 +0000

The MODIS RGB image for the morning of March 7 as Saturn moves off shore and begins to head north towards New England

Nilsen

The Eye Caught Moving Up the Coast

nstrands — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:33:22 +0000

Nilsen

RU 23′s Flight into the Storm

nstrands — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:28:40 +0000

In preparation for the storm, a team from Rutgers deployed RU 23 to sample the waters along the Mid Atlantic Bight as Saturn moves up our coast. View photos from the deployment here

And Check out the data from Ru 23 in near real time as our page updates once an hour throughout the storm:

Temperature Time Series as RU 23 flies through Saturn

Time Series of Color Disolved Organic Matter in the water column as RU 23 flies through Saturn

Nilsen

The Eye of Saturn

nstrands — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:50:14 +0000

As winter storm Saturn moves up the coast along the Mid-Atlantic Bight, MARACOOS has taken action, viewing from space with satellites, mapping surface currents with HF Radar, and monitoring subsurface conditions with glider RU 23.

Visible Cloud Imagery

Surface Currents from the HF Radar visualizing the eye of the storm off of Maryland

Rutgers Glider RU 23 sailing south into the storm

Nilsen

And the Clouds Have Parted

nstrands — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:29:50 +0000

And here is the Rutgers Modis RGB image for Feb 10th after Nemo has moved out into the Atlantic

Rutgers Modis RGB image for Feb 10, 2013

As we can see, there is strong white band through Connecticut where some parts got up to 38 inches of snow.

Nilsen

Tail end of the Storm

nstrands — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 05:19:05 +0000

Nemo has just about left the North East to move on to the Atlantic leaving in its wake over 650,000 people without power. However teams are working around the clock clearing the streets and attending to these outages so we can only hope power will be returned to these areas as soon as possible.

U. Delaware RGB Image for the afternoon of Feb 9 2013

Nilsen

The cold side of Nemo

scott — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 15:24:18 +0000

Nemo is up over Canadian waters. New England is still under the clouds on the cold side of this storm.

MARACOOS HF Radar network emerges

scott — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 12:36:50 +0000

Hurricane Sandy did significant damage to the MARACOOS HF Radar network. But the MARACOOS Radar-techs were able to borrow pieces, move Radars, and quickly reassemble the primary regional long-range network used by the U.S. Coast Guard for Search And Rescue, but at reduced level of resiliency. Though weakened by Sandy, we hoped the patchwork of duct tape and shoe laces would hold through Nemo. We wanted to capture the rapidly changing ocean currents driven by the storm as a validation test case for our ocean models. Getting a good forecast of the ocean is one of many steps we hope will continue to improve weather forecasts into the future.

As Nemo moves north, we are watching the MARACOOS HF Radar network emerge from the storm this morning.

Hurricane Sandy tracked through the middle of the network, with extensive damage to anything north of the eye. This time, Nemo has taken out the northern side of the network, from New York City into New England. Hopefully this is just power or communication losses, not actual damage to radar sites like in Sandy.

Continuing Through the Night

nstrands — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 05:35:35 +0000

As the night pushes onward, Nemo continues to wreck havoc along the coast of the Mid Atlantic Bight.

The latest imagery from NOAA’s GOES satellites shows the concentration of the moisture in the atmosphere in our region which will continue to fall through tomorrow, resulting in accumulations of nearly 30 inches in some parts of the region

Finally it looks like the intensity of the storm has pushed our HF Radar network to its limits as coverage up near the cape has started to cut out. The power companies along the region expected hundreds of thousands of outages, so we can only hope that gaps in coverage are from power loss and not damage to the equipment.

Nemo HF Radar Animation 2100-0200

Nilsen

10.5 Inches is only the Beginning

nstrands — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 02:19:49 +0000

Over the past few hours Nemo has moved further up along the eastern seaboard and is beginning to really hit Long Island pretty hard. I was able to create animations showing the storms progression through the HF Radar Maps and via screenshots of the WeatherFlow radar images

Nemo HF Radar Animation 1400-2100

WeatherFlow Radar 4:50pm – 8:40pm

While working on these I have had The Weather Channel on in the background, and heard a few very interesting tid bits about the storm. First of which was of the image below (screen shots of radar from The Weather Channel’s Broadcast) is showing the intensity of the snow fall. They claimed that never before has a snow storm yielded such an intensity resulting in the deep blues shown over Long Island to the east of Islip. Normally their maps only show the lighter blues that are over northern NJ and New York City in the image below. These darker blues are showing the areas over Long Island that have already seen 10.5+ inches of snow and according to their forecast this area is still only in the beginning.

Next TWC went into the strong winds that will start kicking in over the next few hours as we go into night with some areas of New England seeing gusts up into the 70′s.

Finally (although I haven’t yet found a detailed image) Greg Seroka pointed me in the direction of WeatherBug.com where I found a map of lightning from this storm.

Nilsen