Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the East Coast of the United States around midnight UTC on October 30, 2012. What made this hurricane so devastating was the storm surge, which pushed water levels one to three meters above normal along the New Jersey and New York coasts. The radar altimeter on the HaiYang (“Ocean” in Chinese) 2A (HY-2A) satellite measured the size and offshore structure of the surge at its peak, across Long Island’s south shore. Significant wave heights measured by the altimeter reached almost 8 m near shore, and the combined effect of storm surge and high surf led to severe coastal inundation. The analysis presented here documents the largest storm surge signal to be captured by satellite altimetry to date, nearly 1.5 m, with validation provided by the nearby tide gauge at Montauk, NY.

Lillibridge, J., M. Lin, and C.K. Shum. 2013. Hurricane Sandy storm surge measured by satellite altimetry. Oceanography 26(2):8–9, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2013.18.

Han, G., Z. Ma, D. Chen, B. deYoung, and N. Chen. 2012. Observing storm surges from space: Hurricane Igor off Newfoundland. Scientific Reports, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep01010.
1. Scharroo, R., W.H.F. Smith, and J.L. Lillibridge. 2005. Satellite altimetry and the intensification of Hurricane Katrina. Eos Transactions, American Geophysical Union 86(40):366, https://doi.org/10.1029/2005EO400004.
2. Schaeffer, P., A. Ollivier, Y. Faugere, E. Bronner, and N. Picot. 2010. The new CNES CLS 2010 Mean Sea surface. Paper presented at the Ocean Surface Topography Science Team Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal, October 2010, http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/documents/OSTST/2010/oral/Schaeffer.pdf.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.