Hurricane Sandy was the most damaging superstorm to come out of the Atlantic area in 2012. It was classified a category three storm when it was at its worst. It was later declared the second most expensive hurricane to hit the US. The damage was mostly dealt to the New Jersey and New York areas, but it ran through 22 other states. I can’t forget to mention that this deadly hurricane went through seven different countries. No question this hurricane was horrific, but how did global warming play a role in its creation?

After doing some research I found that there is no factual evidence the directly correlates global warming and Hurricane Sandy, but there are factors created from climate change that some believe could have had an influence on the hurricane. One of these factors was an odd push of the storm west towards New Jersey. The push was created by a high pressure area in the North East Atlantic Ocean near Greenland. The reason why climate change played a part here is because this movement went against usual weather patterns. This point leads me to the second condition that possibly affected the storm, which is the high sea level. The raise in sea level contributed to increasing the amount of flooding and damage that is associated with that. During that year the sea level was slightly higher than average due to its slight raise in temperature. Hurricanes are more common and usually more severe when the ocean it originates from is warmer, which is the third factor of climate change.

Sources:

– http://www.climatecentral.org/news/how-global-warming-made-hurricane-sandy-worse-15190

– http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/06/hurricane-damage-climate-change_n_2081960.html

– http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/did-global-warming-contribute-to-hurricane-sandys-devastation/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0