New perspectives on the synoptic development of the severe October 1992 Nome storm

Understanding the characteristics of storms that impact the Alaska region is of importance to emergency planning. The 5-7 October 1992 storm was a severe event which cost Nome, a town in Alaska, $6 million dollars. We will explore its characteristics with the aid of two established cyclone tracking schemes: the NOAA CPC current operational algorithm and the University of Melbourne algorithm. Manual tracking was performed as a control. The essential features are captured by both algorithms, but they differ in the genesis and lysis location. The NOAA algorithm broke the storm into two separate events. Synoptic development of the storm was influenced by a blocking high that affected how the tracking algorithms handled the event. A synoptic re-examination of this storm is presented in terms of the depth, Laplacian and radius of the system. These new results present a fresh perspective on the intensity and longevity of this dramatic storm. Citation: Mesquita, M. d.S., D. E. Atkinson, I. Simmonds, K. Keay, and J. Gottschalck (2009), New perspectives on the synoptic development of the severe October 1992 Nome storm, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L13808, doi: 10.1029/2009GL038824.