Green Blog: Did Global Warming Contribute to Hurricane Sandy's Devastation?

Was the bizarre storm called Sandy a product, in whole or in part, of human-induced climate change?

That may not be a top-of-mind issue for the millions of people who will spend coming weeks recovering from the damage. But it is an important scientific question, one whose answers could shed light not just on why this storm happened but also on what to expect in the future.

The first thing to say is that climate scientists are just not in a good position to answer it yet.

Some of them are already offering preliminary speculations, true, but a detailed understanding of the anatomy and causes of the storm will take months, at least. In past major climate events, like the Russian heat wave and Pakistani floods of 2010, thorough analysis has taken years — and still failed to produce unanimity about the causes.

But in interviews on Tuesday, several climate scientists made some initial points. A likely contributor to the intensity of Sandy, they said, was that surface temperatures in the western Atlantic Ocean were remarkably high just ahead of the storm — in places, about five degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal for this time of year. In fact, part of the ocean was warmer than it would normally be in September, when accumulated summer heat tends to peak.

Kevin E. Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said that natural variability very likely accounted for the bulk of that temperature extreme. And many of Sandy's odd features derived from its origin as a "hybrid" storm — a merger of several weather systems, including a hurricane and a midlatitude storm that had earlier dumped snow in Colorado.

"My view is that a lot of this is chance," Dr. Trenberth said. "It relates to weather, and the juxtaposition of weather systems. A hybrid storm is certainly one which is always in the cards and it's one we've always worried about."

But, he added, human-induced global warming has been raising the overall temperature of the surface ocean, by about one degree Fahrenheit since the 1970s. So global warming very likely contributed a notable fraction of the energy on which the storm thrived — perhaps as much as 10 percent, he said.

Other scientists are looking at this year's historic loss of sea ice in the Arctic as a potential contributor to the track of Sandy, and possibly to the severity of the storm.

Summer sea ice in the Arctic has fallen by roughly half since the late 1970s, a change most climate scientists believe has been caused largely by human-induced warming. A large camp of experts, Dr. Trenberth among them, believe the weather effects have mostly been confined to the Arctic Ocean and surrounding land areas.

But some published research suggests the consequences extend much farther. The idea is that the loss of sea ice is altering the flow of the atmosphere enough to heighten the risk of severe weather in midlatitude regions like the United States.

In articles like this one, I have cited the work of Jennifer A. Francis, a Rutgers University climate scientist who is a leading proponent of this view. My colleague on the opinion side of The Times, Andrew Revkin, posted an analysis from Dr. Francis this week in which she noted that an atmospheric blocking pattern over Greenland — possibly linked, in her view, to the loss of sea ice in the nearby Arctic Ocean — had helped force the storm to make a left turn into the United States mainland.

"While it's impossible to say how this scenario might have unfolded if sea-ice had been as extensive as it was in the 1980s, the situation at hand is completely consistent with what I'd expect to see happen more often as a result of unabated warming and especially the amplification of that warming in the Arctic," Dr. Francis wrote.

Although Sandy began as a hurricane, drawing strength from evaporation at the warm ocean surface, scientists noted that by the end it was also pulling energy from a second source: the sharp differences in atmospheric temperature and pressure that normally drive winter storms.

Kerry A. Emanuel, a leading climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out that little analysis had been done of whether this type of storm might become more frequent or intense as the earth warms in the coming century.

"The only honest answer for hybrid events is that we don't quite know what to expect with those," Dr. Emanuel said. "My profession hasn't done its homework."

That is a sharp contrast with the state of knowledge involving hurricanes. Extensive computer modeling has suggested that the number of Atlantic hurricanes will stay the same or even decrease with global warming, but that the intensity of the storms that do occur is likely to increase. Dr. Emanuel predicted that Sandy would set off a scientific rush to perform the same kind of modeling for hybrid storms.

"I think there's going to be a ton of papers that come out of this, but it's going to take a couple of years," he said.

Scientists don't need fancy computer modeling to know that the biggest problem seen during Hurricane Sandy will become worse in the future: storm surge.

The ocean is rising relentlessly, and scientists say this is a direct consequence of global warming. Warm water expands, just as warm air does, and the warming of the ocean is one factor behind the rise. Another is that land ice the world over is starting to melt as the climate grows warmer, dumping extra water into the ocean.

Over all, the ocean rose about eight inches in the last century. The rate appears to have accelerated recently, to about a foot per century, and some scientists think it will accelerate further, so that the rise between now and the end of the century could exceed three feet. The problem will be exacerbated in places where land is also sinking, such as the mid-Atlantic region of the United States and southern Louisiana.

The likely effect, Dr. Emanuel said, is that coastal flooding on a scale that once happened only once or twice per century — the scale of Sandy, in other words — will become much more commonplace within the coming decades.

"There's a reason why we build houses as far back from the beach and as high up as we do," Dr. Emanuel said. "Sea-level rise is putting our built structures closer to the water line, in effect."

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Green Blog: Nuclear Plants Get Through the Storm With Little Trouble

The nuclear reactors in Sandy's path mostly handled the storm well — better than other parts of the region's electric system.

But one reactor, on the New Jersey coast, declared a low-level emergency because rising water threatened to submerge pumps it uses to pull in cooling water.

That plant, Oyster Creek, in Toms River, about 60 miles east of Philadelphia, had shut a week earlier for refueling, but still had cooling requirements, especially for its spent fuel pool, where fuel used decades ago is stored; that fuel must be kept submerged, and continues to generate waste heat.

Oyster Creek declared an alert, the second lowest on the four-step emergency scale established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, on Monday night. If the operators had been forced to turn off the water-intake pumps, they might have had to use fire hoses to add water to the pool, to make up for evaporation as it heated up.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, without any cooling, the pool would have taken about 25 hours to reach the boiling point, giving the operators time to implement an alternate cooling method.

Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the commission, said that the operators of the plant, which is owned by Exelon, had moved a portable pump into the threatened building in case the regular pump had been submerged, but they had not had to use it. In a statement, David Tillman, a spokesman for Exelon, the plant's owner, said that no water had flooded into the plant and that "all safety and backup systems operated fully and reliably."

The reactor's operators hoped to exit the "alert" status on Tuesday.

The number of alerts declared at plants around the country is usually a handful a year. According to the N.R.C. definition, an alert means "events are in process or have occurred which involve an actual or potential substantial degradation of the level of safety of the plant." Radiation releases, if any, are expected to be a small fraction of the level that would require action offsite, according to the definition.

In Buchanan, N.Y., Indian Point 3 shut down at 10:41 on Monday night because of a disturbance on the high-voltage grid, but Indian Point 2 continued running. Upstate, Nine Mile Point 1 automatically shut down when the flow of power into the plant failed; Nine Mile Point 2 also felt the disturbance but its emergency diesel generators started up and it kept running, Mr. Sheehan said. Nuclear plants deliver huge quantities of electricity to the grid, but they run some of their equipment on power drawn from the grid, so that if they shut down suddenly, their equipment is still powered.

Three reactors reduced power, partly at the urging of the regional grid operators, who said that if one of the plants had failed suddenly at full power, the loss would destabilize the system. Those were Millstone 3, in Waterford, Conn., and Limerick 1 and 2, in the Pennsylvania town of the same name, northwest of Philadelphia.

Some reactors also reported that some of their emergency sirens had been knocked out by the storm.

The NRC said it would continue to monitor the affected plants.

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Hurricane Sandy Barrels Region, Leaving Battered Path

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Keith Klein and Eileen Blair among homes destroyed by fire in the Breezy Point section of Queens. More Photos »

The New York region began the daunting process on Tuesday of rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a storm that remade the landscape and rewrote the record books as it left behind a tableau of damage, destruction and grief.

The toll — in lives disrupted or lost and communities washed out — was staggering. A rampaging fire reduced more than 100 houses to ash in Breezy Point, Queens. Explosions and downed power lines left the lower part of Manhattan and 90 percent of Long Island in the dark. The New York City subway system — a lifeline for millions — was paralyzed by flooded tunnels and was expect to remain silent for days.

Accidents claimed more than 40 lives in the United States and Canada, including 22 in the city. Two boys — an 11-year-old Little League star and a 13-year-old friend — were killed when a 90-foot-tall tree smashed into the family room of a house in North Salem, N.Y. An off-duty police officer who led seven relatives, including a 15-month-old boy, to safety in the storm drowned when he went to check on the basement.

On Tuesday, the storm slogged toward the Midwest, vastly weaker than it was when it made landfall in New Jersey on Monday night. It delivered rain and high winds all the way to the Great Lakes, where freighters were at a standstill in waves two stories tall. It left snow in Appalachia, power failures in Maine and untreated sewage pouring into the Patuxent River in Maryland after a treatment plant lost power.

President Obama approved disaster declarations for New York and New Jersey, making them eligible for federal assistance for rebuilding. "All of us have been shocked by the force of mother nature," said the president, who plans to visit New Jersey on Wednesday. He promised "all available resources" for recovery efforts.

"This is going to take some time," he said. "It is not going to be easy for these communities to recover."

There was no immediate estimate of the losses from the storm, but the scope of the damage — covering more than a half-dozen states — pointed to billions of dollars. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called it "incalculable."

Rescuers looked for survivors in the wet rubble in places like Atlantic City, and state and local officials surveyed wreckage. Utility crews began working their way through a wilderness of fallen trees and power lines. And from Virginia to Connecticut, there were stories of tragedy and survival — of people who lost everything when the water rushed in, of buildings that crumbled after being pounded hour after hour by rain and relentless wind, of hospitals that had to be evacuated when the storm knocked out the electricity.

The president spoke with 20 governors and mayors on a conference call, and the White House said the president would survey damage from the storm with Mr. Christie on Wednesday. Mr. Obama's press secretary said the president would join Mr. Christie, who has been one of his harshest Republican critics, in talking with storm victims and thanking first responders.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Mr. Obama had also offered to visit the city, "but I think the thing for him to do is to go to New Jersey and represent the country."

Connecticut, New Jersey and New York reopened many closed roads and bridges, and the New York Stock Exchange made plans to resume floor trading on Wednesday after a two-day shutdown, its first because of weather since a blizzard in 1888.

There were no traffic signals on the walk from Fifth Avenue to the East River. Police officers were directing traffic; here and there, bodegas were open, selling batteries and soft drinks. In Times Square, a few tourists walked around, though some hotels still had sandbags by the doors.

Mr. Bloomberg said 7,000 trees had been knocked down in city parks. "Stay away from city parks," he said. "They are closed until further notice."

The mayor also said that trick-or-treating was fine for Halloween, but the parade in Greenwich Village had been postponed. The organizers said it was the first time in the parade's 39-year-history that it had been called off.

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Scientists Move Closer to a Long-Lasting Flu Vaccine

As this year's flu season gathers steam, doctors and pharmacists have a fresh stock of vaccines to offer their patients. The vaccines usually provide strong protection against the virus, but only for a while. Vaccines for other diseases typically work for years or decades. With the flu, though, next fall it will be time to get another dose.

"In the history of vaccinology, it's the only one we update year to year," said Gary J. Nabel, the director of the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

That has been the case ever since the flu vaccine was introduced in the 1950s. But a flurry of recent studies on the virus has brought some hope for a change. Dr. Nabel and other flu experts foresee a time when seasonal flu shots are a thing of the past, replaced by long-lasting vaccines.

"That's the goal: two shots when you're young, and then boosters later in life. That's where we'd like to go," Dr. Nabel said. He predicted that scientists would reach that goal before long — "in our lifetime, for sure, unless you're 90 years old," he said.

Such a vaccine would be a great help in the fight against seasonal flu outbreaks, which kill an estimated 500,000 people a year. But in a review to be published in the journal Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses, Sarah Gilbert of Oxford University argues that they could potentially have an even greater benefit.

Periodically, a radically new type of flu has evolved and rapidly spread around the world. A pandemic in 1918 is estimated to have killed 50 million people.

With current technology, scientists would not have a vaccine for a new pandemic strain until the outbreak was well under way. An effective universal flu vaccine would already be able to fight it.

"Universal vaccination with universal vaccines would put an end to the threat of global disaster that pandemic influenza can cause," Dr. Gilbert wrote.

Vaccines work by enhancing the protection the immune system already provides. In the battle against the flu, two sets of immune cells do most of the work.

One set, called B cells, makes antibodies that can latch onto free-floating viruses. Burdened by these antibodies, the viruses cannot enter cells.

Once flu viruses get into cells, the body resorts to a second line of defense. Infected cells gather some of the virus proteins and stick them on their surface. Immune cells known as T cells crawl past, and if their receptors latch onto the virus proteins, they recognize that the cell is infected; the T cells then release molecules that rip open the cells and kill them.

This defense mechanism works fairly well, allowing many people to fight off the virus without ever feeling sick. But it also has a built-in flaw: The immune system has to encounter a particular kind of flu virus to develop an effective response against it.

It takes time for B cells to develop tightfitting antibodies. T cells also need time to adjust their biochemistry to make receptors that can lock quickly onto a particular flu protein. While the immune system educates itself, an unfamiliar flu virus can explode into full-blown disease.

Today's flu vaccines protect people from the virus by letting them make antibodies in advance. The vaccine contains fragments from the tip of a protein on the surface of the virus, called hemagglutinin. B cells that encounter the vaccine fragments learn how to make antibodies against them. When vaccinated people become infected, the B cells can quickly unleash their antibodies against the viruses.

Unfortunately, a traditional flu vaccine can protect against only flu viruses with a matching hemagglutinin protein. If a virus evolves a different shape, the antibodies cannot latch on, and it escapes destruction.

Influenza's relentless evolution forces scientists to reconfigure the vaccine every year. A few months before flu season, they have to guess which strains will be dominant. Vaccine producers then combine protein fragments from those strains to create a new vaccine.

Scientists have long wondered whether they could escape this evolutionary cycle with a vaccine that could work against any type of influenza. This so-called universal flu vaccine would have to attack a part of the virus that changes little from year to year.

Dr. Gilbert and her colleagues at Oxford are trying to build a T cell-based vaccine that could find such a target. When T cells learn to recognize proteins from one kind of virus, the scientists have found, they can attack many other kinds. It appears that the flu proteins that infected cells select to put on display evolve very little.

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In Theory: A Weak Spot in H.I.V’s Armor Raises Hope for a Vaccine

The search for a vaccine against AIDS has been long and fruitless — mostly because the virus mutates so fast.

As is well known, flu vaccines have to be reformulated every year because influenza viruses mutate so steadily. But the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, mutates as much in a single day as flu virus does in a year, presenting scientists with an almost insurmountable challenge.

This month, South African researchers announced that they had found a vulnerable spot on the virus's outer shell that might present a good vaccine target, and that they had also learned, for the first time, at what stage of an infection it develops. They found only two women whose virus had the vulnerability — and it wasn't the same virus that first infected them, but a mutant that developed a few months later.

The research, published by Nature Medicine on Oct. 21, was praised as "very interesting" by several AIDS experts.

"It's a combination of good science and 'Boy, did we get lucky,' " said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "They had all these blood samples and virus samples."

The researchers, led by Dr. Salim Abdool Karim, president of South Africa's Medical Research Council and best known for pioneering work on vaginal microbicides, screened hundreds of blood samples given at regular intervals by 79 women who had been in earlier clinical trials at his Durban clinic and had become infected during the trials.

"What we have that's unique," Dr. Karim said, "is that for the first time, we understand how a person can make broadly neutralizing antibodies."

The virus's vulnerable spot — open to antibody attack — was created when a sugarlike surface compound called a glycan shifted positions.

Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins produced by the immune system that attach to a virus and block its outer receptors — sort of the way sweater fuzz attaches to Velcro and renders it unsticky.

There are many strains of H.I.V., and no known antibody incapacitates all of them. But in the last few years, several teams of scientists have isolated about a dozen that each can shut down up to 80 percent of all virus strains. These are said to be "broadly neutralizing."

Less than 20 percent of all patients naturally develop such antibodies in their blood, and even those who do aren't fully protected. One of the women whose blood was crucial to Dr. Karim's study has died of AIDS-related tuberculosis, and the other is on antiretroviral drugs.

Nonetheless, experts hope it will eventually be possible to manufacture cocktails with large doses of several kinds of antibodies to treat patients — or even to induce the immune system to make those particular antibodies, which would amount to a vaccine.

But that will take more work, and more luck.

Dr. John P. Moore, an AIDS researcher at Weill Cornell Medical School, called the South African paper "good solid science, but not enough to know if you have the right target."

"It's like looking at a castle and saying: 'I can see a weak point, but I don't know what kind of battering ram to get,' " he added.

Normally, H.I.V. repels antibodies by mutating its Velcro hooks into different shapes. But some spots on the viral shell don't change shape easily. Scientists from the National Institute for Communicable Diseases in South Africa and universities in KwaZulu/Natal, Cape Town and North Carolina, as well as from Harvard, screened multiple blood samples looking for previously known antibodies. They found them in the two women, and noted how long into their infections those antibodies appeared — around six months, it turned out, after their infections were first detected.

Then the scientists looked to see what exactly had changed in the virus circulating in their blood at that time.

They found that a sugarlike glycan had moved from Position 334 to Position 332 on one of the lumpy spikes that stud the virus. That tiny change allows the antibody to attach and alert the body that the whole round virus is an invader, Dr. Karim said.

Antibodies neutralize viruses by blocking their receptors and by attracting white blood cells that will engulf the virus.

Most of the work was done by South Africans and paid for by the South African government, Dr. Karim said proudly, although additional money came from the United States National Institutes of Health and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Dr. Karim, who also teaches at Columbia University in New York, particularly praised one local researcher, Penny L. Moore of the National Health Laboratory Service in Johannesburg.

"She's one of our up-and-coming stars," he said. "Old fogies like myself are quickly becoming redundant."

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Profiles in Science Peter G. Neumann: Rethinking the Computer at 80

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Peter G. Neumann

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Many people cite Albert Einstein's aphorism "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Only a handful, however, have had the opportunity to discuss the concept with the physicist over breakfast.

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student at Harvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation's leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

"His biggest contribution is to stress the 'systems' nature of the security and reliability problems," said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. "That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact."

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that "complex systems break in complex ways" — that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible "cyber-Pearl Harbor" attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a "clean slate."

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory.

"I've been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years," said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. "And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don't want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions."

An Early Voice for Security

Dr. Neumann, who left Bell Labs and moved to California as a single father with three young children in 1970, has occupied the same office at SRI for four decades. Until the building was recently modified to make it earthquake-resistant, the office had attained notoriety for the towering stacks of computer science literature that filled every cranny. Legend has it that colleagues who visited the office after the 1989 earthquake were stunned to discover that while other offices were in disarray from the 7.1-magnitude quake, nothing in Dr. Neumann's office appeared to have been disturbed.

A trim and agile man, with piercing eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, Dr. Neumann has practiced tai chi for decades. But his passion, besides computer security, is music. He plays a variety of instruments, including bassoon, French horn, trombone and piano, and is active in a variety of musical groups. At computer security conferences it has become a tradition for Dr. Neumann to lead his colleagues in song, playing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer.

Until recently, security was a backwater in the world of computing. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry, though one of dubious competence, and safeguarding the nation's computerized critical infrastructure has taken on added urgency. President Obama cited it in the third debate of the presidential campaign, focusing on foreign policy, as something "we need to be thinking about" as part of the nation's military strategy.

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Hurricane Sandy Predicted to Bring ‘Life-Threatening’ Surge

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

Ricky Rojas, 27, right, and his family, from left, wife Rene, 27, daughter Katie, 12 months, and Rachel, 2, settled in at an emergency shelter in Woodbine, N.J. More Photos »

Hurricane Sandy, a menacing monster of a storm that forecasters said would bring "life-threatening" flooding, churned toward some of the nation's most densely populated areas on Sunday, prompting widespread evacuations and the shutdown of the New York City transit system.

Officials warned that the hurricane, pushing north from the Caribbean after leaving more than 60 people dead in its wake, could disrupt life in the Northeast for days.

New York went into emergency mode, ordering the evacuations of more than 370,000 people in low-lying communities from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Battery Park City in Manhattan and giving 1.1 million schoolchildren a day off on Monday. The city opened evacuation shelters at 76 public schools.

The National Hurricane Center said it expected the storm to swing inland, probably on Monday evening. The hurricane center reported that the storm had sustained winds of almost 75 miles an hour.

"We're going to have a lot of impact, starting with the storm surge," said Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "Think, 'Big.' "

The subway closing began at 7 p.m. to darken every one of the city's 468 stations for the second time in 14 months, as officials encouraged the public to stay indoors and worked to prevent a storm surge from damaging tracks and signal equipment in the tunnels. A suspension of bus service was ordered for 9 p.m.

The closing this year seemed more ominous. The shutdown before Tropical Storm Irene last year began at noon on a Saturday, and service resumed before the workweek started on Monday. This time, officials warned, it might be Wednesday before trains were running again.

Another fear in the Northeast was that winds from the storm might knock down power lines, and that surging waters could flood utility companies' generators and other equipment.

Forecasters said the hurricane was a strikingly powerful storm that could reach far inland. Hurricane-force winds from the storm stretched 175 miles from the center, an unusually wide span, and tropical storm winds extended outward 520 miles. Forecasters said they expected high-altitude winds to whip every state east of the Mississippi River.

President Obama, who attended a briefing with officials from FEMA in Washington called Hurricane Sandy "a big and serious storm." He said federal officials were "making sure that we've got the best possible response to what is going to be a big and messy system."

"My main message to everybody involved is that we have to take this seriously," the president said.

The hurricane center said through the day on Sunday that Hurricane Sandy was "expected to bring life-threatening storm surge flooding to the mid-Atlantic Coast, including Long Island Sound and New York Harbor."

The storm preparations and cancellations were not confined to New York.

Amtrak said it would cancel most trains on the Eastern Seaboard, and Philadelphia shut down its mass transit system.

In the New York area, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's commuter rail lines, which suffered the heaviest damage during Tropical Storm Irene, were suspended beginning at 7 p.m. on Sunday.

New Jersey Transit began rolling back service gradually at 4 p.m., with a full shutdown expected by 2 a.m.

The Staten Island Ferry was scheduled to stop running by 8:30 p.m., PATH trains at midnight.

The nation's major airlines canceled thousands of flights in the Northeast. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the three major airports in the New York City area, said it expected major carriers to cease operations entirely by Sunday evening. The Coast Guard closed New York Harbor — cruise ships were told to go elsewhere — and the Northeast faced the possibility of being all but shut down on Monday.

Reporting on Hurricane Sandy was contributed by Matt Flegenheimer, John Leland, Colin Moynihan, Sharon Otterman, William K. Rashbaum, Marc Santora, Sam Sifton, Nate Schweber, Michael Schwirtz, Kate Taylor and Vivian Yee from New York; Angela Macropoulos from Fire Island, N.Y.; Jeff Lebowitz and Michael Winerip from Long Beach, N.Y.; Sarah Maslin Nir from East Hampton, N.Y.; Elizabeth Maker from Milford, Conn.; Kristin Hussey from Stamford, Conn.; Stacey Stowe from Yonkers; Brian Stelter from Rehoboth Beach, Del.; Matthew L. Wald from Washington; and Jon Hurdle from Philadelphia.    

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A Third Day of Protests in China Against Refinery

Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

Protesters faced off against the riot police on Sunday in Ningbo, China. Many said they were wary of the government's about-face.

BEIJING — Officials in the coastal city of Ningbo, China, promised on Sunday night to halt the expansion of a petrochemical plant after thousands of demonstrators clashed with the police during three days of protests that spotlighted the public's mounting discontent with industrial pollution.

The protests, which followed similar demonstrations in other cities in the past year, point to the increasing willingness of the Chinese to take to the streets despite the perils of openly challenging the country's authoritarian government.

Although local officials were undoubtedly alarmed by the size and ferocity of the protests, their decision to bend so quickly was also probably influenced by the coming series of meetings that will determine China's next generation of leaders. The ruling Communist Party, always eager to keep a lid on public discontent, is especially nervous about any disruptions that might mar the 18th Party Congress, which is set to begin on Nov. 8 in the capital and will serve to ratify the first change of leadership in a decade.

But Ningbo residents reached by phone said they were skeptical of the government's sudden change of heart. "The announcement is just a way to ease tensions," said Yu Xiaoming, a critic of the plant who took part in negotiations with the authorities on Sunday.

The protests, which began last week when farmers blocked a road near the refinery, grew over the weekend as thousands of students and middle-class residents converged on a downtown square carrying handmade banners and wearing surgical masks painted with skull and bones.

On Saturday, the demonstrations turned violent when riot police fired tear gas and began to beat and drag away protesters. At one point, according to people who were there, marchers tossed bricks and bottles at the police. At least 100 people were detained, according to some estimates, although most were later released.

The project, an $8.8 billion expansion of a refinery owned by the state-run behemoth Sinopec, was eagerly backed by the local government, which has been promoting a vast industrial zone outside Ningbo, a city of 3.4 million people in Zhejiang Province. Residents were particularly unnerved by one major component of the project: the production of paraxylene, a toxic petrochemical known as PX that is a crucial ingredient in the manufacture of polyester, paints and plastic bottles. Many residents contend that the concentration of polluting factories in the Ningbo Chemical Industrial Zone has led to a surge in cancer and other illnesses.

While mass demonstrations against mining operations, copper smelters and trash incinerators have disrupted Chinese cities in recent years, the construction of paraxylene plants has been especially controversial. In 2007, protesters in the coastal city of Xiamen, in Fujian Province, successfully forced the relocation of a PX plant that had been planned just 10 miles from downtown. Last August, officials in Dalian, in northeast China, announced that they would shut down a PX plant there after thousands of residents angrily confronted the riot police. That factory is still operating.

Ma Jun, an environmental activist in Beijing, applauded the government's sudden about-face but said he hoped the weekend of unrest would convince Chinese leaders that soliciting public opinion on industrial development is in their best interest, especially given how much money is wasted when such projects are canceled midway.

"We've seen the same pattern over and over again," said Mr. Ma, the director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. "Ignoring public concerns leads to confrontation. We can't resolve all our environmental issues through street action. The cost is just too high."

Despite the best efforts of government censors, many of the protests have been fueled by social media. In Ningbo, residents held aloft smartphones and computer tablets and flooded microblog sites with images and vivid descriptions of the running battles with the police. The Chinese news media carried no reports of the protests.

In recent days, the district government of Zhenhai, which includes Ningbo, one of China's most affluent cities, tried to reassure residents, saying the plant would include the latest pollution-control technologies. Officials also said they had spent nearly $1 billion to relocate 9,800 households away from the refinery site.

In a brief statement posted on the government's Web site on Sunday, officials said they decided to cancel the PX plant after consulting with investors. They also pledged to conduct "scientific verifications" on other elements of the project, although they provided no further detail.

The announcement appears to have done little to mollify popular anger. According to The Associated Press, an official who read the statement through a loudspeaker on Sunday evening was drowned out by the crowd, which then called on the mayor to resign and demanded the release of protesters who had been detained.

Later in the evening, several people posting on Sina Weibo, a popular microblog service, said the police were arresting students at Ningbo University and protesters on the street who had refused to disperse. The accounts could not be verified.

Patrick Zuo contributed research.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 29, 2012

A previous version of this article misstated the timing of an announcement by officials in Dalian. They announced that they would shut down a PX plant there in August of last year, not this year.

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Shallow Waters and Unusual Path May Worsen the Surge

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Watching for the power of the storm yet to come in Long Beach, N.Y. More Photos »

Like a hand pushing water in a bathtub, the winds of a hurricane push the water of the Atlantic Ocean. When the windblown water runs up against land, the water piles up and flows inland. That describes a storm surge.

"It's almost a little bit like a tsunami," said Klaus H. Jacob, a scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

When Hurricane Sandy makes landfall late Monday or early Tuesday, the pulse of windblown water will be "in a word, bad," Dr. Jacob said. "It's of course still somewhat uncertain. It all depends on the exact timing."

Storm surges like those accompanying Hurricane Sandy as it churns north are, at their simplest, a function of strong winds driving too much water into too small a space. But other factors, some of which will come into play as this storm approaches the New York area, can combine to make surges higher and more destructive, experts said.

"A storm surge is really caused by one thing," said Pat Fitzpatrick, an associate research professor at Mississippi State University who studies the phenomenon. "When a storm is approaching land, it starts to encounter shallow water. The water tends to pile up."

The height of a surge depends to a great extent on how shallow the water is near the coast. "The shallower the water is, for longer distance, the more vulnerable an area is," Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

The New York area has extensive shallow water offshore, and was expected to see some of the largest surges — National Weather Service computer models were predicting a storm surge of 6 to 11 feet at Battery Park at the lower end of Manhattan. The surge also could coincide with high tide at about 9 p.m. Monday, with tides even higher than usual because of the full moon.

"It's kind of a worst-case scenario for the New York Harbor area," said Alan Cope, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, N.J.

Hurricane Sandy is much larger, with greater surge potential, than the devastating Tropical Storm Irene last year, with winds already up to 60 miles an hour over an area more than 500 miles northeast of its center. Adding to the potential for damage was the hurricane's unusual track. The expected path northwest will trap water against the shores of New York and New Jersey, Mr. Cope said.

"It's going to blow the water from east to the west and pile it up in Raritan Bay and also pile it up in the western end of Long Island Sound," he said.

Many Atlantic hurricanes move parallel to the coast for long distances and then, pushed by high-level winds, veer northeast, eventually "spinning out," or losing their energy, over the North Atlantic. But by the time it nears New York on Monday, Hurricane Sandy will have traveled hundreds of miles from the coast for several days, picking up enormous amounts of water over the open ocean.

The storm's winds, which are rotating in counterclockwise, are creating an area of strong ocean waves north and east of the storm's center. "That amplifies the surge," said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, part of the National Weather Service.

As Hurricane Sandy approaches New York, forecasters expect it to hit a roadblock. Instead of veering northeast and out to sea, the storm will be forced to move west by a strong and persistent region of high-pressure air over southeastern Canada and southern Greenland.

"It's quite unusual to have this westward component of motion to a hurricane track," said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Web site Weather Underground.

As it moves west, the hurricane is expected to make landfall in New Jersey, perpendicular to the coast. Such a head-on hit can produce worse surges than a glancing blow because more water can be driven into estuaries and harbors.

"The bottom line for New York and New Jersey and Long Island Sound is that they are going to have the worst of the surge and coastal inundation," Mr. Uccellini said.

But strong surges are only one aspect of this storm that makes it potentially deadly, he added.

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Some Exhibits at Natural History Museum Are Only Seen by Researchers

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

COLD STORAGE At the American Museum of Natural History, George Amato reached into a vat, cooled by liquid nitrogen, holding vials of tissue samples.

George Amato climbs a step and lifts the lid on a shiny stainless steel vessel that is basically a tall, portly thermos bottle. Clouds swirl off liquid nitrogen inside, making the tank look like a high-tech witch's caldron.

This vessel and the others in the room hold some of the least-imposing exhibits in the American Museum of Natural History, the sprawling, 143-year-old complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Inside the vessels are tall racks that hold small boxes; each box contains dozens of plastic vials; each vial contains a tissue sample, and all of it is preserved at minus 160 degrees Celsius. The museum has collected 70,000 of these vials from 40,000 animal species since the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection opened in 2001.

"There is no other tissue bank that has the overall diversity of life represented here," said Dr. Amato, director of the museum's Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics.

Few visitors to the museum would be likely to want to see the little bar-coded vials. They lack the grandeur of the rearing Barosaurus skeleton in the Roosevelt Rotunda or the 94-foot model of a blue whale. Those can be found in the vast public spaces of the museum's complex of 26 buildings; the Monell collection sits in a basement room next to the carpentry shop.

The samples in the mist are part of more than 32 million biological specimens and cultural artifacts owned by the museum, only a tiny fraction of which are seen by the public. Their purpose is not to educate and entertain visitors, but to further the museum's role as one of the world's leading research institutions, with more than 200 scientists on board. This is the museum's less-known life, but one that goes back to its founding in 1869.

Anesthetized by visits to museums that have more in common with amusement parks than with research centers, most visitors would be surprised to find that the American Museum of Natural History grants graduate degrees to scientists who work within its walls. Facilities like the Monell collection show how the scientific work undertaken at the museum has broadened over the years: what started with avid collecting, comparing and drawing of specimens, skeletons, feathers and skin now involves DNA sequencing, CT scanning and high-powered computational analysis.

The office of Michael J. Novacek, provost of science at the museum, shows the blending of old and new. The outer wall of the office is curved, tucked into one of the seemingly ancient towers at a corner of the building. On his desk is a big-screen iMac computer displaying a project the museum is engaged in under a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, a database known as the MorphoBank.

The database turns morphology — the study of the form and structure of organisms to discern the evolutionary relationships among them — into a social media endeavor that incorporates physical characteristics, genetic expression and environmental factors to more fully describe "the tree of life," Dr. Novacek said. As he gazes at a screen filled with information about the anatomy of elephants, he notices that a colleague in England has added an image and filled in accompanying information about it.

"It changes the way people work, it changes the way people collaborate, and it really shoots science ahead," he said.

And, he added, projects like this mean that the museum's scientific resources are open to the world. "It's as if we took these 32 million things — specimens, tissues and artifacts — and opened a window on them," he said. "It's not just on display in an exhibit or sitting in a drawer in the corner of the museum."

These resources will eventually be accessible to schoolchildren and the general public in formats they can understand and use, he predicted. The hundreds of schoolchildren waiting at a nearby subway stop to enter the museum may not know about the online world of the collections, he said, but "they will know this."

For now, he notes, the rich scientific work of the museum goes largely unnoticed outside the scientific community. Dinosaurs, meteorites, the hominid Lucy and the Star of India sapphire get the spotlight. "In some ways, we're victims of our own success," he said. "The objects are so amazing."

The museum now looks at its objects differently, with tools that include scanning electron microscopes and a CT scanner that allow magnification and imagery that seem the stuff of science fiction — or nightmares. Scientists can study the hairs and carapaces of insects, wear patterns on ancient rock tools from Kenya or the inscription on a sword that has fused with its sheath. In the room that houses the CT scanner, a table is crowded with jars containing snakelike creatures preserved in alcohol, ready for their extreme close-ups.

Underlying the museum's research efforts is computational power that is now beginning to tackle some of the tough problems of sorting through enormous amounts of data for comparison, pattern recognition and analysis. That is the work of Ward Wheeler, whose banks of clustered computers sit in the museum's basement around a corner from the cryo lab.

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