Jane Castor, the mayor of Tampa, has little patience for local residents who plan to disobey the evacuation orders that have been issued in the run-up to Hurricane Milton’s expected landfall on Florida’s gulf coast on Wednesday evening, Oct. 9. “If you choose to stay in one of these evacuation areas,” she said in a CNN interview, “you’re going to die.”
Alarming? Yes. Hyperbole? Probably not.
TIME editor-at-large Jeffrey Kluger explains why Milton is nothing short of a meteorological monster.
Alarming? Yes. Hyperbole? Probably not.
TIME editor-at-large Jeffrey Kluger explains why Milton is nothing short of a meteorological monster.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Hurricane Milton will be the worst storm to hit Florida in a century.
00:05The minimum threshold for a Category 5 hurricane, the most powerful type of storm, is sustained
00:11winds of 157 miles per hour.
00:15Milton is exploding at 175.
00:18The storm has grown fast.
00:21Rapid intensification of a hurricane occurs when its sustained winds increase by 35 miles
00:26per hour in a 24-hour period.
00:28Milton blew past that benchmark with wind speeds intensifying by 90 miles per hour in
00:3424 hours.
00:36Much of the heat a hurricane needs to operate comes in the form of high surface temperatures
00:40in local bodies of water, in this case, the Gulf of Mexico.
00:45The minimum water temperature required to sustain a hurricane is 79 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:50Low wind shear matters, too.
00:53There's plenty of shear in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico at the moment, but Milton
00:58is too far south to be much affected by it.
01:00The third part of the environmental trifecta that is turbocharging the storm is high atmospheric
01:06humidity.
01:08Humidity in the region is currently 62% and is expected to rise to 68% by Wednesday.
01:15Relatively high air temperatures exceeding 80 degrees Fahrenheit help the already soggy
01:20atmosphere entrain more water still.
01:23Climate change is exacerbating all of this.
01:26Weather models run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predict that
01:31by the end of the century, the eastern part of the U.S. will be struck especially hard
01:37by super hurricanes, meaning more hits in unlikely places like western North Carolina,
01:43which was just devastated by Hurricane Helene.
01:47But Helene has since moved on, leaving death and wreckage in its wake, but at least passing
01:52into history.
01:54Milton, meantime, is still barreling towards us.