Superstorm Sandy packed more total energy than Hurricane Katrina at landfall: Second Strongest in History

The horrific storm surge flooding in New Jersey and New York caused by Sandy was almost perfectly predicted well in advance, but was more extreme than the average person might expect from a minimal hurricane. That’s where Sandy’s immense size comes into play.

There is a metric that quantifies the energy of a storm based on how far out tropical-storm force winds extend from the center, known as Integrated Kinetic Energy or IKE*. In modern records, Sandy’s IKE ranks second among all hurricanes at landfall, higher than devastating storms like Hurricane Katrina, Andrew and Hugo, and second only to Hurricane Isabel in 2003.

The above chart compares IKE and intensity for storms at the time they struck land (in the U.S.). Not all historic storms can be included because a detailed wind field analysis (required to compute IKE) is unavailable for storms in the distant past. But this chart shows the majority of high-ranking modern cases.

Sandy’s IKE was over 140 Terajoules (TJ, 1 TJ = 1 trillion Joules = 277,778 kilowatt hours), meaning it generated more than twice the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. At any given moment, many hurricanes contain more energy than an atomic bomb in their surface winds alone (even excluding winds at higher elevations and latent heat energy).

Though way down on the scale, I include Andrew and Charley in the chart to show how their small IKE contrast their high rankings on the Saffir-Simpson scale which is based solely on peak sustained winds. This demonstrates small intense storms generate far less energy than large weak storms.

[link to www.washingtonpost.com]