Yesterday was the two-year anniversary of the landfall of Post-Tropical Storm Sandy. The occasion was marked by a brief spate of Sandy-themed media stories. I was part of a few of those, so the book got some attention. In the midst of this self-promotion, I did my best to take a few moments to remember the disaster itself and those who suffered grievous losses because of it.

But, ok, here is an account of the various media and things. The Sandy anniversary wasn’t about me, but this blog kind of is, right?

Most prominently, I had the opportunity to be a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC. The podcast is here – it’s around 40 minutes long!

Then, one thing that was not media per se, but a live event featuring an actual audience: on the evening of Tuesday October 28 I had the pleasure of giving a talk for the Secret Science Club, at the Bell House in Gowanus, Brooklyn. (Here is a detailed account of my talk by an audience member, whom I didn’t have the pleasure to meet.) I had done this once before, just a couple of weeks after Sandy.

If I had not been to these events, I wouldn’t have believed that they could exist. A scientist gives a talk in what is basically a rock club. The space holds a few hundred people, and it pretty much fills. The crowd is incredibly enthusiastic, and asks questions afterwards for as long as time permits – the organizers, Margaret Mittelbach and Dorian Devins, have to shut the Q&A down after a while. What is most remarkable about this is that most of the scientists who speak are not celebrities. I, for example, am no Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Yet several hundred people turn up, regularly, to hear what are – at least in my case – nothing more than power point science talks.

In the routine activities of scientists, we never have this experience. I have given many, many talks, but have never  had the kind of reaction that I got from these audiences. No matter how good a talk one gives to a room full of scientists, they never get that excited. They have heard many, many talks, and are jaded. It’s a newer experience for these people who come to SSC, I guess. In any case they are definitely not jaded, but respond as though they were at a theatrical performance. Or a comedy show. I have never had so many people laugh at my jokes.

What the SSC made me think the first time, and still does, is: if this can be a thing, can it be ten things? If you can fill a big performance space once or twice a month with people listening to science talks, could you fill many more, many more often? Could we have as many evening venues for science as we have for comedy, theatre, or music?

Anyway, then here are a few online articles in which I was quoted in the last couple days (in some of them at great length):

Climate Central story on how Sandy has inspired new research in the last two years.

Vice News story on New York City real estate and FEMA flood zones.

Salon story (via alternet) that’s not about Sandy at all, but about the seasonal forecasts for next winter; this is the one that led to my blog post last week.

New Jersey Star Ledger opinion piece by Paul Mulshine based in large part on a phone interview with me.

Storm Surge got a nice review in Publishers Weekly. Here it is quoted in its entirety:

“Hurricane Sandy hit metropolitan New York hard in October 2012, knocking out power while ruining homes and businesses; it turned parts of Manhattan into swampland, flooded subway stations and transit tunnels, and devastated much of the Jersey shore. Though the damage it caused is irrefutable, the cause of the hurricane itself, says Columbia University atmospheric scientist Sobel, is up for debate. In this comprehensive volume, he looks at the science behind Sandy (and similar weather systems), examining the circumstances leading to it—”the left turn it took” in the ocean in “a radical departure from all known meteorological history”—and factors that made it a superstorm. How did it complete “its transition from a tropical cyclone to a mammoth hybrid”? Sobel diligently re-creates a timeline, from the early warnings issued by the National Hurricane Center to government evacuation orders to the impact Sandy had once it made landfall. Along the way, he provides substantial background information on what, exactly, a hurricane is and how the Fujiwhara effect—named for Japanese meteorologist Sakuhei Fujiwhara—applies to dueling vortices. Topics like these make for interesting, if technical, reading, and Sobel manages to strike an effective balance. (Oct.)”

And, Kevin Krajick has posted an interview piece with me on the Columbia Earth Institute State of the Planet blog.

Storm Surge comes out today!

I spent yesterday at the Northeast Risk & Resilience Leadership Forum, in the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, CT. This is an event put on by the Risk Sciences Foundation, which is connected to the reinsurance company Renaissance Re. It was a one-day meeting on the risks faced by the northeast US coasts due to storms, sea level rise, and climate change: what the risks are, and what governments, private companies, and anyone else might do about them. With its two-year anniversary coming up, Sandy loomed large.

This meeting was different than my usual. I go mainly to scientific conferences, where the speakers are mostly other research scientists and everyone talks about scientific research. There are sometimes a few people with a policy bent, but they’re a minority, and they don’t change the dynamic much; they come to keep up with the science.

The crowd at this meeting was more eclectic. One wouldn’t necessarily think of the different groups who showed up as being similar, but they share an interest in the theme of coastal risk. Beyond that, they share a set of concepts and understandings about what could be done better.

Of course you had your insurance and reinsurance people; they organized the meeting. Then there were people whose jobs are about making housing more disaster-resistant, through building codes and the like (Federal Alliance for Safe Homes, Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety). This group is connected with the insurance industry but doesn’t actually sell insurance. There were people from government agencies – federal (including one U.S. senator and one Obama administration official), state, and local; some had titles that wouldn’t have existed too many years ago (e.g., “Chief of Environment, Energy and Open Space” or “Senior Policy Advisor, Climate Change and Insurance”). Then you had various nonprofits of a more or less environmental bent (National Wildlife Federation, Union of Concerned Scientists). And finally, a few academic scientists.

All these people agree that we don’t take the risks from coastal storms seriously enough, and that more money and effort should be put into pre-disaster “resilience” (ultra-trending buzzword of the moment) rather than just post-disaster recovery.

There are differences of emphasis in how the different constituencies would do this. The nonprofit types advocate for green infrastructure, ecosystem restoration, and sustainable development – including slowing or even reversing development in the most vulnerable coastal areas. Insurance people (and ok, a lot of others) advocate for reform of the National Flood Insurance Program to make it solvent – exactly as the Biggert-Waters act did, before it was substantially rolled back – and thus to de-incentivize development in those risky areas by raising rates there. Housing people advocate for better housing.

There was no contentious argument about which of these was more important. Rather, there seemed to be consensus that all of them are good, all are complementary, and none are being done enough now.

The scientists, like me, just advocate that everyone should pay attention to the science. (I argued that sea level rise is the most important factor increasing risk, at least as far as we can say now with certainty; changes in storms may well be important too, but are more uncertain and will take longer to show up above natural variability). That wasn’t a hard sell here; if there were any climate change deniers in the house, they stayed silent.

The fact that this was true at a meeting organized by a reinsurance company is big by itself. The insurance industry is not Greenpeace or 350.org; they take climate change seriously for purely business reasons. Given the way the political discussion around climate is often cas in this country, insurance (or reinsurance) companies do us all a service by talking about it publicly. (The US military is perhaps the other organization that takes climate change most seriously while conforming least to any stereotype that one might associate with that stance. There were no military at this conference to my knowledge, but there was Alice C. Hill, high up in Obama’s Homeland Security team. She said “Climate change is a threat multiplier.”)

While a lot of interesting people said a lot of interesting things, I was mainly impressed just by how well this diverse group hung together. There should be a name for this collection of people that captures their shared interest and purpose. I hereby propose “riskies”.

This is the down side of trying to blog an extreme weather event in real time while holding down a full time job as an academic. Just can’t keep up.

When I wrote my previous post on Typhoon Vongfong (shown above in a recent visible satellite closeup, from this great site) last night, Vongfong’s winds were estimated at 90 knots, and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) had forecast that it would intensify to 130 knots over the next 48 hours. When I woke up this morning it was estimated at 120 knots already; it’s now at a screaming 155 knots, or 178 mph (per JTWC).

The NHC defines “rapid intensification” as an increase of 30 kt in 24 hours, so Vongfong has definitely undergone rapid intensification. It was not forecast, but it rarely is. While tropical cyclone track forecasts have improved steadily for decades, intensity forecasts haven’t, and the difficulty of forecasting jumps like Vongfong just made are a big part of the reason.

It’s not just the forecast of the storm’s future that’s the issue, though. Even estimating its intensity at the present moment poses challenges. While JTWC is calling it 155 knots – the very upper end of category 4, pushing category 5, the top of the scale – the most recent estimate from the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) puts it just at 115 knots, low category 3. Some of this difference is attributable to the different standards; JTWC uses 1-minute averaged sustained winds while JMA uses a 10-minute average, which tends to be a little lower. But that isn’t the whole story.

In fact, no one is measuring the winds in Vongfong. There is no routine aircraft reconnaissance in the Western Pacific to make direct observations. The estimates all come from analysis of satellite observations, and satellites don’t measure the winds directly. The satellite images used to estimate intensity see some combination of clouds and water vapor, and either human analysts or automated pattern recognition algorithms use those to infer the wind speed. (To get some idea how it’s done, try this.)

There’s no doubt that Vongfong is a very powerful storm. The forecast models are mostly predicting that it will start to weaken by a day or so from now, perhaps after holding steady or even intensifying a bit more before then (see for example a collection of current forecasts on Kerry Emanuel’s page). The track forecasts are still taking it over Japan early next week. Assuming that pans out, as seems likely, the question is just how rapidly Vongfong loses its currently formidable head of steam.

Fortunately, Phanfone turned out not to be a major disaster for Japan. There have been some power outages, some disruption to air travel and other things, and a handful of people killed (mainly due to being in or near the waves at at a bad time, whether the Americans in Okinawa or the surfer in Kanagawa). Nothing to make light of, but not nearly as bad as it could have been.

But it’s not yet time for Japan to relax. The next Typhoon, Vongfong, is spinning its wheels in the tropical western Pacific, and is likely to take almost the same path as Phanfone did, down to the landfall on Honshu, Japan’s big island.

Vongfong is currently estimated to be a category 2 storm, with peak winds of 90 knots, or over 100 mph. It has developed the appearance to go with that intensity, including a proper eye, seen here in the latest visible satellite image:

Track and intensity forecasts for this storm, as for all tropical cyclones in the western Pacific, are issued by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the US Joint Typhoon Warning Center. Like the US National Hurricane Center (which produces all our forecasts here in the US for the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific) and other forecast centers worldwide, both agencies issue forecasts out to 5 days. The current track forecasts look quite similar to what Phanfone’s did at this stage. This includes especially the northward turn, scheduled for around 48 hours from now, shown here in the current forecast map from JMA:

While these forecasts have no landfall in them yet, the numerical models seem to be reaching some agreement that Japan is likely to get another one in about a week. Here is a forecast map from NOAA’s GFS model for 00 UTC next Tuesday, October 14. (The recent runs of the ECMWF model look pretty similar.) The map shows surface pressure (contours) together with 500 hPa geopotential height (color shading). Vongfong is the bullseye riding up the east coast of Honshu, interacting with an upper level trough (the southward dip in the ribbons of color) to undergo extratropical transition into a midlatitude cyclone:

Even the intensity forecast (from JTWC) is eerily similar to Phanfone’s. At 90 kt now, Vongfong is forecast to make it up to a 130 kt super typhoon, in the low end of category 4, over the next 48 hours, before starting to weaken again as it moves over cooler waters and higher wind shear. Just how much it weakens is the key question – the phasing with the upper trough in the model run above is just of the right kind to add an extra jolt of energy from the jet stream at landfall. (That’s what happened to Sandy just about two years ago, and in fact the map above would look quite similar to the equivalent one at Sandy’s landfall, if one were to swap North America for Asia.)

Why would two storms develop so similarly, one right after the other?

First, the Western North Pacific has more tropical cyclones per year than any other region on earth. A typical year sees around 90 in the whole earth; the WNP typically accounts for 25 or 30 of those. For our North Atlantic 10 would be about average.

But there’s more to it than just a lot of storms. They do form in bunches sometimes, and it may not be an accident. One typhoon can help generate the next one, when its own spin interacts with the earth’s much larger-scale rotation to produce a “Rossby wave” wake in the atmosphere to its east or southeast – a high pressure, clear weather ridge, followed by another low-pressure trough, typically about 2000-3000 km away, which then is a promising site for another typhoon to form. I haven’t analyzed the early biographies of Phanfone and Vongfong yet to see if they might have been such a “mother-daughter” pair at Vongfong’s genesis, but if they did it wouldn’t be very unusual.

As for the tracks being the same after genesis, that may be just a consequence of the large-scale steering winds not having changed much during the interval between the two storms. It’s fall, the Pacific jet stream should be starting to make its way south, but isn’t far enough south yet for its westerlies to blow the storms back out to sea before they get as far north as Japan.

While those scientific explanations are backed by some research – the links above are to my own research papers, with my former Ph.D. student Kyle Krouse – I don’t think we understand everything we could about the clustering of tropical cyclones in time and space.

Perhaps the most extreme case in (relatively) recent memory was the Atlantic season of 2005, when the hurricanes just kept coming, one after another, long after they had any right to. That was mind-boggling at the time. This current pair in the Pacific may be less so, but it still feels a little spooky.