Hurricane Sandy is moving away from central Florida as I type this -- now located about 400 miles to the northeast of Orlando as of 8:30pm Saturday. Rain bands from Sandy have been just offshore most of the day, with showers a mere 30 miles or so east of the Brevard coast. Sandy will continue moving northeast tonight and will take with it the canopy of high clouds overhead; throughout the day Sunday, clouds will thin and it will finish mostly sunny. It remains windy for us Sunday, though, with gusts of 25-30+ mph still possible. The wind will be nothing like we saw late Friday, though, where parts of the coast felt gusts over 60 mph and metro Orlando even gusted to 40-50 mph.

The big story comes early in the week as Sandy sets its sights on the Mid Atlantic and Northeast. An unsual set of ingredients: a winter time upper level disturbance, strong upper level high over the north Atlantic, and Sandy will come together to provide a potentially historic event. Having grown up in the Northeast, this truly is a once in a lifetime scenario: it's exceedingly difficult to get a storm to make landfall along the concave coastline of the northern Mid Atlantic (it bends away from the open waters of the Atlantic). What's needed for that to happen, though, is in place:

• Upper level disturbance over the Appalachians: This upper level storm will help pinwheel Sandy back toward the coast as it reaches the latitude of New Jersey. Essentially, it will grab Sandy and steer it inland.
• Strong upper level ridge over the North Atlantic: An unusually strong upper level high is located over Greenland and will arch back westward into northern New England. This will block Sandy's "escape route" out to sea into the North Atlantic, as many storms this time of year do.

Most likely, Sandy will come ashore in northern New Jersey or southeast New York. While this would be a bad scenario for southern New England -- strong onshore wind of 60+ mph over many, many hours -- it's not quite as bad as the "worst case" scenario of a landfall over Delaware or Cape May, NJ. This would keep very much low lying areas along the NJ coast into New York City north of the center of the storm for an extended time period: simply put, storm surge of 4-8 feet or more would be likely in these areas that are very much ill equipped to deal with such an event.

Sandy's wind field will be very large: so an enormous area of the Northeast will feel strong tropical storm force wind. As Sandy fully transitions to a "hybrid" storm -- one that is warm core (like a tropical cyclone) but is influenced by temperature gradients (like a winter-time low -- or nor'easter), its wind field will become larger. This will likely lead to mass power outages in the Northeast -- outages that could last for days. My sense is this will be the big "legacy" of Sandy -- a virtual blackout for very populated areas.

Another component to the storm is cold and snow: indeed, even with a tropical system, with an injection of abnormally cold air on its southwest side, several inches of heavy, wet snow are possible in southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia at the highest elevations.

Our Jorge Estevez will be reporting live from the New York City area starting tomorrow on Eyewitness News -- we'll be watching history with him.

Brian Monahan