A late October Nor’easter --- sound familiar? Superstorm Sandy in 2012 came just around this time.
New Jersey State Climatologist David Robinson, a geography professor at Rutgers, said this storm was certainly not a Sandy, or the monster that hit this area about two months ago.
“It’s not an Ida, but some areas of the state picked up a month’s worth of average rainfall in just 12 hours,” he said. “But with Ida we had areas that picked up twice a monthly rainfall total in six or seven hours.”
As for whether global warming was a factor in this storm, Robinson said most significant weather events are now being intensified by climate change.
“This Nor’easter would occur without human influence,” he said, “but like most of our weather events in this day and age it’s being amplified, enhanced, we’re getting a little bit more moisture out of it.”
And while this storm came within just a few days of Sandy nine years ago, he said there was a critical difference.
“I suppose you could say we’re very fortunate,” he said, “that this Nor’easter developed of and by itself and did not combine its energy with a tropical system coming out of the south Atlantic.”