Yesterday I asked one of my forecasters if they were especially busy out on the floor given Sandy’s progress through the Northeast. He began to say yes, but then paused, laughed, and said instead, “Not really. I mean, there’s nobody flying out there right now.” His statement was quite true, as yesterday at 4 pm, the number of cancelled flights had grown to more than 19,500, with more expected as the NY area airports are still expecting limited operations. LGA in particular will remain closed until further notice due to flooding and damage on the tarmac and runways. The photo below (courtesy of CBS News) captured the standing water at the airport yesterday afternoon.

121030 Aerial view of flooding at LaGuardia (courtesy of CBS News)

As the afternoon was oddly quiet here yesterday, I took the chance to view Sandy through some of the GOES-R products at my disposal. Below is a loop of ACHA Cloud Top Heights from 121029 1745 UTC – 121030 0755 UTC (click for animation), in which the transition of Sandy from tropical to post-tropical can easily be seen. Tropical characteristics, a more banded appearance shown by the higher cloud tops (blue shades) wrapped around the eye of the storm, slowly transitioned into the more comma-like shape of a post-tropical system and more uniform cloud top heights (green shades) as the dry stratospheric air was wrapped in.

121029 1745 UTC – 121030 0755 UTC ACHA Cloud Top Heights