AccuWeather's Alex DaSilva says Hurricane Helene will continue to strengthen leading up to landfall in Florida tonight. The storm could grow to as high as a Category 4 as people are urged to evacuate.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Hurricane hunters have been finding the winds upticking a little bit. I think we're very,
00:04very close to Category 3 status right now. The next update from the National Hurricane Center
00:08will be 11 a.m. Eastern Time, and it would not shock me if this is either a very, very high-end
00:15Cat 2 or if they just decide to make it a Cat 3 because the radar presentation and the satellite
00:20presentation has greatly improved here over the last three to six hours. Yeah, when you see that
00:25really well-defined eye, we typically see that in a major hurricane. So when you look at the
00:31water vapor loop then, you can see a lot of why this storm is strengthening and strengthening so
00:35quickly. Yeah, we're really starting to see a lot of that moisture expand around the center
00:40of circulation. The storm actually got a little bit of dry air in there last night, and it kind
00:44of prevented this from becoming a little bit stronger by this morning, but I think that dry
00:48air is being cycled out. You can really see that green expanding around the center of circulation,
00:53and I think we have a rapidly strengthening hurricane at this current time. And this is a
00:58product that we have been really hitting hard on. A lot of people understandably know how warm the
01:03ocean water may be in the Gulf of Mexico if they've been there and been able to swim in it,
01:07but it goes so much deeper than just the surface where we may be interacting with. It certainly
01:11does. This is the ocean heat content, essentially the depth of that warm water, and you can see the
01:15storm moving over that red area. We call that the loop current. Very deep, very warm water,
01:20and so I think that's why over the next 6 to 12 hours we could really see this thing ramp up
01:25prior to landfall. All right, let's take a look here at the exclusive accurate eye path here,
01:29and you've been talking about the storm continuing to strengthen here. You can see the landfall point
01:34at 10 o'clock this evening as a Category 4 hurricane. Yeah, Helene could be a Category 3
01:38as early as 11 a.m., if not a little bit later, but then we really expect the storm to ramp up
01:43here before landfall, anticipating a Category 4 hurricane later on this evening around the
01:48Big Bend of Florida with winds as strong as 130 to 135 miles per hour.