Hurricane Milton spawns unusually violent tornadoes that rival the Great Plains

When Debbie Jones felt the pressure drop and her ears pop in the Holiday Pines neighborhood of Ft. Pierce, he knew it was a tornado.

“Suddenly, the power went out. I started to hear the wind picking up and the debris starting to hit really hard. So we closed the hurricane shutters and bolted out of there with them,” said Megan Brown, whose boyfriend is Jones’ son. The family barricaded themselves with their four dogs behind the house, away from the windows.

There were 38 preliminary eyewitness reports of tornadoes in Florida as of Wednesday night, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center. The state sees an average of 50 tornadoes in an entire year. The confirmed number is expected to rise in the coming days as damaged sites are assessed.

“That’s certainly going to be a notable part of this storm, was how many tornadoes occurred in such a short period of time,” said Matthew Elliott, warning coordinator meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center.

Five tornado-related deaths occurred at Spanish Lakes Country Club near Fort Pierce on Florida’s Atlantic coast, authorities said. At a White House briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said up to 10 deaths from the tornadoes had been reported, but cautioned that the number was provisional.

The eyewitness reports came as the National Weather Service issued 126 tornado warnings for the state yesterday.

The ferocity of the spinners was also an unusual aspect of Milton.

“It’s definitely out of the ordinary,” said Northern Illinois University meteorology professor Victor Gensini. “Hurricanes produce tornadoes, but they are usually weak. What we saw today was much closer to what we see on the Great Plains in the spring.”

Conditions for breeding tornadoes were particularly favorable. Hurricane Milton spent the day offshore with the heat from the sun and atmospheric instability creating the right environment.

Tornadoes spawned by hurricanes and tropical storms most often occur in the right front quadrant of the storm, but can sometimes occur near the storm’s eyewall, according to NOAA. The heat and moisture present in the atmosphere during such storms and changes in wind direction or speed with height, known as wind shear, contribute to their likelihood.

“There’s an incredible amount of vorticity going on,” Gensini said of the conditions that allowed the twisters to grow. “Those tornadoes were just in a very favorable environment.”

Earlier this year, Hurricane Beryl spawned 65 confirmed tornadoes in several states. The most ever caused by a hurricane was 118 from Ivan in 2004. The difference is that Milton’s tornadoes all touched down in Florida and within just eight to 10 hours.

Teasing out the damage caused specifically by Milton’s tornadoes could be tricky, but scientists say it’s important to keep accurate records of tornadoes.

Tornado trends can be grouped into three separate seasons: spring, typical cyclone season, and late fall and winter. “It really shows that tornadoes can be a significant part of a tropical cyclone, in this case, a Category 3 hurricane,” Elliot said.

Warming oceans from climate change are making hurricanes more intense, but Gensini said he knows of no link between human-caused warming and the deadly tornadoes Floridians experienced with Milton.

Deaths were reported in St. Lucie on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, but local authorities did not say how many residents were killed.

Florida has more tornadoes per square mile than any other state. But they are usually not as severe as those in the Midwest and Plains. However, a large explosion of powerful twisters killed 42 people and injured more than 260 in Central Florida in the span of a few hours in February 1998.

___

Matat reported from Ft. Pierce, O’Malley of Philadelphia and Naishadham of Washington, DC