Hurricanes like Sandy accumulate their energy from the warm waters in the top layer of the Ocean and the unusually warm late October may have made the Hurricane more destructive. Overall, the temperature of the ocean surface has raised by about one degree Fahrenheit since 1970s, said to be due to global warming. So, the Ocean surface temperature in the Western Atlantic contributed a noticeable part (10%) of the energy on which Sandy thrived.
Many of Sandy's outstanding features, including its large scale, were derived from its origin as a merger of two weather systems that converged in the western Atlantic. The ocean rose about eight inches in the last century, and the rate seems to have accelerated to about a foot. The rise is said to be a direct consequence of human-induced climate change.
At the time by which Sandy hit the Northeast coast in the US, it became a freakish hybrid of a large, late-season hurricane and a winter storm more typical of the middle latitude. This type of hybrid storm is rare enough and it has not been studied yet for whether it is likely to become more common in an ever warming climate.
