A team of researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and Cray Inc., simulated the evolution of hurricane Sandy as it approached and made landfall, with catastrophic impacts over the northeastern United States. The simulation was performed on the Blue Waters Cray supercomputer at NCSA, using the NCAR/WRF-ARW regional prediction system. The simulation was comprised of previously unsurpassed ~4 billion computation grid points, with a horizontal grid resolution of 500 m with 150 vertical levels. The simulation is part of NCAR’s research agenda to advance knowledge and predictive skill of high-impact weather hazards and the transition of research-to-operational services. It illustrates the importance and benefits of advances in super-computer capacity and visualization systems for Earth-system research and weather prediction. The NCAR VAPOR visualization system was used to create animations, tracking the storm’s progress, enabling analysis of flow trajectories and associated dynamical processes during the life cycle of Hurricane Sandy. Technical details of the simulation are described in the SC2013 article ‘Petascale WRF Simulation of Hurricane Sandy: Deployment of NCSA’s Cray XE6 Blue Waters.’