Remember when we did a bit of premature fearmongering over soon-to-be great halloween storm Sandy? Turns out, it wasn't that premature, and we have a name for it courtesy of the Wall Street Journal: Snor'eastercane.
If you can't quite nail what that portmanteau means, it's not a sleepy Christian holiday where you chew on sugar cane. It's the combination of Snow, Nor'easter, and Hurricane.
The WSJ outlines the increasing possibility of a trough pulling in a powerful hybrid hurricane/nor'easter — something then only predicted by one model. It's basically a race between the jet stream and now-Hurricane Sandy.
The Euro (ECMWF) model has for four days now shown a fully phased Sandy making landfall somewhere on the East Coast, but has recently centered most of its estimates on the New York City area. A similar solution has been consistently shared by most other models except one - the GFS. On Tuesday, for the first time, that model too appears to have tentatively come in line with the others as a majority of its submodels (17 out of 20, by my count) now show an East Coast hit. The mean of these solutions shows an intense storm just off Montauk point early Tuesday morning with other possible landfalls ranging from Washington, D.C. to Cape Cod.
If we do hit a worst case scenario, picture a perfect storm but stronger, snowier, and maybe even slower.
Of course, meteorologists are still saying there's about an equal chance that it goes out to sea and we won't have to see Al Roker get swept out to sea while reporting from the Delaware coast.
(Hat tip to Brian Stelter!)