The highly unusual weather factors that brought superstorm Sandy to New Jersey caused “the worst coastal battering on record,” the state’s official climatologist said in a new report.
The early study, released Thursday night by state climatologist David Robinson, outlines the exceptional destruction of weather events on Oct. 29.
He found that storm surges on the northern coast exceeded previous records by more than three feet. Winds also reached strengths in central and northern parts of the state that have likely never been as strong in the modern era, according to the report.
In the southern coastal region, Robinson found that Sandy’s landfall brought levels of precipitation statically likely to happen once every 200 years, with wind gusts reaching as high as 88 miles per hour.
Sandy joins the nor’easter of 1962 and the hurricane of 1944 as New Jersey’s “most destructive coastal storms of the past century,” said Robinson, a professor at Rutgers University.
After making landfall near Atlantic City, the superstorm hooked northwest from along New Jersey’s coast as a result of what Robinson described as unique weather phenomena. Instead of blowing out to sea, a high-pressure system sitting in the Canadian Maritimes combined with a low-pressure one in the central Atlantic to suck Sandy back to land.
“Such was the case that the New Jersey coast was in the cross hairs of this rogue storm,” Robinson said.
In what the climatologist called a “remarkable” coincidence, Sandy landed the same day as the surprise snowstorm last year that caused widespread power loss through New Jersey.