It's a bit of a stretch, but the word "snor'eastercane" is supposedly a portmanteau of "snow", "nor'easter", and "hurricane". Credit to the Wall Street Journal for the name.
Odds are increasing that a hybrid “snor’eastercane” could make landfall near Greater New York early next week, with wide-ranging impacts affecting nearly the entire East Coast.
The Twitter hashtag is #snoreastercane and is in use already, with comments like this from @LoriG: "Unexpected consequence of global warming: having to learn the names of a bunch of new types of storms". Most of the storm traffic is on #sandy.
The other name for the storm is "Frankenstorm", from the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center extended forecast for Thursday, October 25, 2012:
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.
Meteorologist Jeff Masters from the Weather Underground has this to say on October 24:
Sandy: a potential billion-dollar storm for the mid-Atlantic, New England, and Canada
[…] These models are predicting that Sandy will get caught up by the trough approaching the Eastern U.S., which will inject a large amount of energy into the storm, converting it to a powerful subtropical storm with a central pressure below 960 mb and sustained winds of 60 – 70 mph. Winds of this strength would likely cause massive power outages, as trees still in leaf take out power lines. Also of great concern are Sandy's rains. Given that ocean temperatures along the Northeast U.S. coast are about 5°F above average, there will be an unusually large amount of water vapor available to make heavy rain.
Another set of forecasts from Cliff Mass have some good graphics (go there for those) – the takeaway prediction:
Sandy is now a category 1 hurricane with estimated maximum sustained winds of 85 mph and central pressure of 970 hPa (see picture). My community is all aflutter about this storm, particularly since our forecast models are not in agreement–some suggest the storm will intensify and head straight in to the Middle Atlantic coastline, some take it out to sea, and others move it out to sea before swinging it westward to hit New England or the Canadian maritimes.
Here's the spaghetti model on October 24, showing the wide range of possible landfalls from Delaware to Newfoundland. There are more spaghetti models for Hurricane Sandy on Cyclocane and more on SpaghettiModels.com.
Your guess may be better than mine as to where this storm will make landfall in the northeastern US.
Impact in the Caribbean: One dead in Jamaica (CNN).
Edward Vielmetti's Wordpress weblog 