Weather
By Dan Skeldon
It’s a seemingly easy trivia question, right? Let’s say you’re at a bar trivia night somewhere along the South Jersey Shore and the weather category comes up. The host then asks this question, and you will likely write down Sandy, as will most other locals and vacationers alike. After all, Sandy is less than ten years in the past, and still fresh in the minds of those that were negatively impacted by the October 2012 storm.
But you would not be correct, even if it’s on a technicality. Sandy was a hurricane up until one hour before it made landfall, just north of Atlantic City on October 29, 2012. Officially, it was “downgraded” to a “post-tropical cyclone,” meaning that it had lost its true tropical identity and had transitioned into a non-tropical storm. Confused? I still am to this day. I worked for 72 hours straight, before, during, and after Sandy’s landfall, and stood outside as the eye of the “hurricane” passed over the NBC40 studios in Linwood. I still insist it was a hurricane at landfall, even if the National Hurricane Center disagrees. In fact, I think that when they re-analyze all of the data from Sandy, which they traditionally do with major storms long after they struck, they will re-classify Sandy as a landfalling hurricane and therefore the correct answer to my initial question. But at least for now, you are wrong if you answered Sandy.
The next logical answer is Irene, which made landfall 14 months before Sandy, eerily in almost the same spot, just north of Atlantic City around Little Egg Inlet. However, Irene weakened from a hurricane when it made its first landfall in North Carolina to a tropical storm when it made its early morning landfall in South Jersey on August 28, 2011. It had 70 mph winds, just 4 miles-per-hour shy of qualifying as a hurricane.
Of course, there were the more recent storms over the last two years, Fay, Isaias, and most recently Elsa. They too were all tropical storms.
So now you may be out of guesses, right? Some may throw out the name Floyd, a very wet and windy system that came through in 1999, but also just a tropical storm as it merged with a cold front as it shot up the coast. Reach further back in your memory banks and you may come up with Gloria, a powerful hurricane in September of 1985, but one that stayed just 50 to 75 miles off of our coast. It’s good that it did, as we are on the weaker side of the storm, and damage was still widespread. However, still no landfall.
There was Belle in 1976, which skirted a bit farther offshore than Gloria did. So the answer still eludes us.
And who could forget the generation-defining March storm of 1962, the Ash Wednesday or “Five High” storm as it is often called, as five straight high tides repeatedly flooded the barrier islands. A powerful storm no doubt, one of the worst ever to hit the shore. But it was officially a winter Nor’easter, and there was nothing tropical about it.
If you listened to your grandparent’s stories from when they were kids, you may impress many (including me) by guessing the Great Atlantic Hurricane of September of 1944. It was a powerful Category 3 storm as it came up the East Coast, but it paralleled the coast offshore, never making landfall until up in southeastern New England. Picture the devastation if it had made a landfall here.
Out of options? I’d imagine many are. To correctly answer the question, you have to go all the way back to the turn of the 20th century to September of 1903. This was long before the practice of even naming hurricanes had begun. It struck as a Category 1 hurricane with 80mph winds on the morning of September 16th, right at the traditional peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. It is the first and only hurricane to ever make an official New Jersey landfall, since records started being kept In 1851. That means just one Garden State landfall in the last 170 years. Dubbed the “Vagabond” hurricane by The Atlantic City Daily Press, it did not parallel the coast like so many other storms. Instead, it’s track was perpendicular to the Jersey shore, as it came in from the southeast and moved northwest, much like Sandy did. It made landfall near Atlantic City, then continued inland along the present course of the Atlantic City Expressway, weakening as it lifted farther northwest into Pennsylvania.
If you guessed correctly, you’re probably in the minoirty. And you certainly deserve the victory.
There is actually a much more frightening storm in New Jersey’s history, one that would be more powerful and up to four times more costly than Sandy if it struck today. In fact, it occurred 200 years ago this year! But that’s a topic for next week’s column. Stay tuned!
Meteorologist Dan Skeldon has a degree in meteorology from Cornell University. He has forecasted the weather in South Jersey for the last 18 years, first on the former television station NBC40 and then on Longport Media radio. Dan has earned the American Meteorological Society Seal of Approval for Broadcast Meteorologists, and now does television broadcasts on WFMZ-TV in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley.
