On the impact angle of Hurricane Sandy’s New Jersey landfall

[1] Hurricane Sandy’s track crossed the New Jersey coastline at an angle closer to perpendicular than any previous hurricane in the historic record, one of the factors contributing to recordsetting peak-water levels in parts of New Jersey and New York. To estimate the occurrence rate of Sandy-like tracks, we use a stochastic model built on historical hurricane data from the entire North Atlantic to generate a large sample of synthetic hurricanes. From this synthetic set we calculate that under long-term average climate conditions, a hurricane of Sandy’s intensity or greater (category 1+) makes NJ landfall at an angle at least as close to perpendicular as Sandy’s at an average annual rate of 0.0014 yr (95% confidence range 0.0007 to 0.0023); i.e., a return period of 714 years (95% confidence range 435 to 1429). Citation: Hall, T. M., and A. H. Sobel (2013), On the impact angle of Hurricane Sandy’s New Jersey landfall, Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, 2312–2315, doi:10.1002/grl.50395.