Here’s what made Hurricane Milton so intense and unusual

The warm water fueled an astonishingly rapid intensification that took Milton from a minor hurricane to a massive Category 5 in less than 10 hours. It weakened but quickly recovered, and when winds briefly reached 180 mph, its barometric pressure, a key measure of a storm’s overall strength, was among the lowest recorded in the Gulf of Mexico late in the year.

At its fiercest, Milton has nearly maxed out its potential intensity given the weather factors surrounding it.

“Everything you want if you want a storm to go absolutely crazy is what Milton had,” said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University.

That’s not all. Milton’s eastward path across the Gulf is so rare that the most recent comparable storm was in 1848. Tampa — the most populous metropolitan area in its general path — hasn’t had a direct hit from a major storm in more than 100 years this week. worst case scenario for many experts.

The track “is not unprecedented, but it is quite rare,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. “And of the people who did that piece, this is by far the most intense.”

“It’s unusual in a number of ways,” said Princeton University climatologist and hurricane expert Gabriel Vecchi. “This storm will probably be very different from any storm that anyone has experienced on the west coast of Florida.”

But it may become less rare, and the U.S. is already on a particularly bad streak. When Helene crossed Florida less than two weeks ago, it was the seventh Category 4 or stronger storm to make landfall in the continental US in eight years. That’s more than three times the average annual rate of such monsters in the U.S. since 1950, according to an analysis of data by The Associated Press.

If Milton somehow hits as a Category 4 storm at landfall, it will be only the second time the nation has been hit twice in one year by such powerful hurricanes. This comes after an unusual 12-year stretch in which no Category 4 or higher storms made landfall between 2005 and 2016.

University at Albany atmospheric scientist and hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero said Milton’s threat now, compared to that 12-year lull, is likely a combination of luck — that those earlier big storms didn’t have made landfall – and climate change driving large storms. different than before.

“With increasingly powerful storms, the chances of a major hurricane hitting the U.S. are increasing,” she said.

Much of what makes Milton ugly is rooted in warmer water since its birth and human-caused climate change, Vecchi, Corbosiero and others said.

Milton formed in the Gulf of Campeche in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico. For a while, forecasters didn’t give the unstable air mass much of a chance to develop into a tropical storm, much less a monster hurricane. But once it defied the odds, it took off because of the warm water and was able to avoid the high-level crosswinds that often decapitate storms, especially in the fall. As Milton neared Florida, he hit those winds, called shear, that sapped his power, just as forecasters had predicted.

Warm water fuels hurricanes. It is essential that the surface water is at least 79 degrees (26 degrees Celsius) and it helps incredibly when there is deep warm water.

The water at Milton’s birth and along his route was about 87 degrees (30.5 degrees Celsius). It’s nearly 2 degrees (1 degree Celsius) warmer than normal and near record levels both at the surface and at depth, McNoldy said.

“Part of the reason it’s been so warm is because of global warming,” Vecchi said, though he added that last year’s El Nino — a natural warming of ocean waters that influences global weather — and other natural factors they played a role. “Now the storm has a lot more energy to use.”

That water became an all-you-can-eat buffet for Milton.

Like an ice skater spinning with her arms close in rather than out, Milton’s small size and tiny eye — which grew to a tiny 4 miles in diameter — also made it easier to overpower.

And then there’s the runway. Corbosiero could not think of a similar track for such a strong storm, especially in October, when there are fewer strong storms in the Gulf and more of the worst storms in the Caribbean.

Klotzbach found one in 1848, before good records were kept, discovering a storm that other experts were not very familiar with.

Typically, storms in the Gulf of Mexico start in the east and move west or simply go north, but Milton is moving east-northeast, Vecchi said. This is due to a weather system in Canada and the US East Coast pushing westerlies, which are common in the mid-latitudes, to where Milton is located, where fall westerlies are less common.

With water gathering with storm surge in this “very, very rare direction,” Corbosiero said Milton “has the potential to be a worst-case scenario” if it hits Tampa directly, where the last major direct hit hurricane was in 1921.

“It’s extraordinarily bad,” McNoldy said.