Cloudy With a Chance of Hybrid Vortices

Weather Underground, via Associated Press Beware the high-impact merging of energetic systems.

In case you're wondering about the severe weather that Hurricane Sandy may bring our way in the next few days, the National Weather Service's Hydrometeorological Prediction Center in College Park, Md., lays it all out in a document, High-Impact Merging of Energetic Systems Anticipated Off the Mid-Atlantic Coast:

Despite a modest cluster of outlying deterministic solutions and ensemble members from the various modeling centers, the lion's share of guidance indicates that the circulation associated with Hurricane Sandy will pass close enough to the amplifying polar trough over the eastern United States to become incorporated into a hybrid vortex over the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast next Tuesday. The high degree of blocking from eastern North America across the entire Atlantic Basin is expected to allow this unusual merger to take place, and once the combined gyre materializes, it should settle back toward the interior Northeast through Halloween, inviting perhaps a ghoulish nickname for the cyclone along the lines of “Frankenstorm,” an allusion to Mary Shelley's gothic creature of synthesized elements.

City Room finds the explanation of the Mary Shelley allusion to be particularly helpful.

For a more prosaic weather forecast, try here.