East Coast Cool-Weather Storms in the New York Metropolitan Region

Abstract

New York coastal regions are frequently exposed to winter extratropical storm systems that exhibit a wide range of local impacts. Studies of these systems either have used localized water-level or beach erosion data to identify and characterize the storms or have used meteorological conditions from reanalysis data to provide a general regional ?climatology? of storms. The use of meteorological conditions to identify these storms allows an independent assessment of impacts on the coastal environment and therefore can be used to predict the impacts. However, the intensity of these storms can exhibit substantial spatial variability that may not be captured by the relatively large scales of the studies using reanalysis data, and this fact may affect the localized assessment of storm impact on the coastal communities. A method that uses data from National Data Buoy Center stations in the New York metropolitan area to identify East Coast cool-weather storms (ECCSs) and to describe their climatological characteristics is presented. An assessment of the presence of storm conditions and a three-level intensity scale was developed using surface pressure data as measured at the buoys. This study identified ECCSs during the period from 1977 through 2007 and developed storm climatologies for each level of storm intensity. General agreement with established climatologies demonstrated the robustness of the method. The impact of the storms on the coastal environment was assessed by computing ?storm average? values of storm-surge data and by examining beach erosion along the south shore of Long Island, New York. A regression analysis demonstrated that the best storm-surge predictor is based on measurements of significant wave height at a nearby buoy.