Hybrid of Sandy, winter storm eyes East Coast

HAVANA?? Hurricane Sandy, strengthening rapidly after crossing the warm Caribbean Sea, slammed into southeastern Cuba early on Thursday with 110 mph winds that cut power and blew over trees across the city of Santiago de Cuba.

The storm has a 70 percent chance of smacking the Northeast and mid-Atlantic next week, with gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and maybe even snow, government scientists said Wednesday.

Forecasters said the storm slated to hit the country's most populous corridor will be an unusual hybrid of hurricane and winter storm ? an early winter storm in the West and a blast of arctic air from the North are predicted to collide.

The eye of the Category 2 storm came ashore just west of Santiago de Cuba, 470 miles southeast of the capital Havana, with waves up to 29 feet and a six-foot storm surge that caused extensive coastal flooding, Jose Rubiera of the Cuban weather service said in a television report.

Story: Hurricane Sandy lashes Cuba; Northeast next week?

Rubiera held the phone up to a window so viewers could hear Sandy's roaring winds that he said had left the city "completely dark" and created a "very tense" situation.

Heavy rains were falling throughout the storm-stricken region, with forecasters predicting six to 12 inches for most areas and as much as 20 inches in isolated places.

Rubiera said Sandy had intensified rapidly as it neared land fueled by 88-degree waters on its way from Jamaica, struck earlier in the day by the storm when it was still at Category 1 on the five-step Saffir-Simpson hurricane intensity scale.

A Category 2 storm has winds between 96 and 110 mph, leaving Sandy within a whisker of becoming a Category 3 hurricane.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami reported gusts up to 114 mph, but Rubiera said a weather station on the Gran Piedra, a mountainous outcropping near Santiago de Cuba, had a gusts up to 152 mph.

At least 55,000 people had been evacuated ahead of Sandy, Cuban officials said, principally because of expected flooding.

Billion-dollar storm?
"It'll be a rough couple days from Hatteras up to Cape Cod," said forecaster Jim Cisco of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction center in College Park, Md. "We don't have many modern precedents for what the models are suggesting."

It is likely to hit during a full moon when tides are near their highest, increasing coastal flooding potential, NOAA forecasts warn. And with some trees still leafy and the potential for snow, power outages could last to Election Day, some meteorologists fear. They say it has all the earmarks of a billion-dollar storm.

Video: Hurricane Sandy could shift into East Coast nor?easter (on this page)

Some have compared it to the so-called Perfect Storm that struck off the coast of New England in 1991, but Cisco said that one didn't hit as populated an area and is not comparable to what the East Coast may be facing. Nor is it like last year's Halloween storm, which was merely an early snowstorm in the Northeast.

This has much more mess potential because it is a combination of different storm types that could produce a real whopper of weather problems, meteorologists say.

"The Perfect Storm only did $200 million of damage and I'm thinking a billion," said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private service Weather Underground. "Yeah, it will be worse."

Interactive: Cubans brace for Hurricane Sandy (on this page)

But this is several days in advance, when weather forecasts are far less accurate. The National Hurricane Center only predicts five days in advance, and on Wednesday their forecasts had what's left of Sandy off the North Carolina coast on Monday. But the hurricane center's chief hurricane specialist, James Franklin, said the threat keeps increasing for "a major impact in the Northeast, New York area. In fact it would be such a big storm that it would affect all of the Northeast."

The forecasts keep getting gloomier and more convincing with every day, several experts said.

Cisco said the chance of the storm smacking the East jumped from 60 percent to 70 percent on Wednesday. Masters was somewhat skeptical on Tuesday, giving the storm scenario just a 40 percent likelihood, but on Wednesday he also upped that to 70 percent. The remaining computer models that previously hadn't shown the merger and mega-storm formation now predict a similar scenario.

The biggest question mark is snow, and that depends on where the remnants of Sandy turn inland. The computer model that has been leading the pack in predicting the hybrid storm has it hitting around Delaware. But another model has the storm hitting closer to Maine. If it hits Delaware, the chances of snow increase in that region. If it hits farther north, chances for snow in the mid-Atlantic and even up to New York are lessened, Masters said.

NOAA's Cisco said he could see the equivalent of several inches of snow or rain in the mid-Atlantic, depending on where the storm ends up. In the mountains, snow may be measured in feet instead of inches.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49546844/ns/weather/

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