CDIP wave observations in Superstorm Sandy

Page 1 Tropical Storm Sandy passed slowly along the eastern coast of the United States during the interval from 24 October to 31 October 2012. Extreme damage from this storm can be attributed, in part, to the coincident arrival of the storm surge with the highest tides of the month. Of greater importance is the unusually large diameter of the storm that resulted in long fetch lengths (the distance over which the wind was building the wave field) and that generated extreme wave heights. A complete record of these waves was acquired by the Coastal Data Information Program (CDIP). CDIP is an extensive network for monitoring waves along the coastlines of the United States that is funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) and, for certain sites, cost-shared with the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). During the passage of the storm from Puerto Rico to offshore New England, the wave field it generated was measured by a series of Datawell Waverider buoys in the CDIP system at the locations shown in Figure 1. These 13 buoys cover a north-south distance of almost 1,700 miles. Each of the buoys reports its observations through periodic transmissions via satellite of 30-minute records of wave height and direction. The data streams provided by this data transmission system are converted into a variety of standardized data products by the CDIP organization at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. These data are available in near-real time at http://cdip.ucsd.edu.