Hurricane Milton is approaching the Florida peninsula, following Hurricane Helene, and is expected to make landfall around the Tampa Bay metropolitan region, which is home to more than 3.1 million people, later Wednesday or early Thursday. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor delivered a harsh warning to the city’s citizens, saying, “There has never been one like this. Helene was a wake-up call. This is literally a catastrophe. I can tell without any dramatization that if you choose to remain in one of those evacuation zones, you will die.” When Miami-based meteorologist John Morales wrote in the Bulletin last week that Hurricane Helene was a “harbinger” of the future, who knew it would happen so soon?
I sat up with Morales in between his regular on-air appearances on NBC6 to talk about what makes Hurricane Milton so unusual and dangerous—especially if it impacts Tampa Bay directly. We also talked about what was going through his head at an emotional moment on television, when he discovered Hurricane Milton had become into a Category 5 hurricane in less than 24 hours.
Jessica McKenzie: I was wondering if you could tell me what you’re witnessing with Hurricane Milton, and what makes it different from prior hurricanes.
John Morales: This is yet another hurricane that is rapidly intensifying. That’s a lot, but what really distinguishes Milton is the hyper, extreme intensification that we experienced, with the atmospheric pressure at the core of the hurricane dropping by 50 millibars in a matter of 10 hours. I understand that’s a technical term, but for a meteorologist, that’s an incredible reduction in barometric pressure. When pressure drops, so do wind speeds. Wind speeds climbed by 80 knots, or 92 miles per hour, during the course of 24 hours. It went from Category 1 to Category 5 in 18 hours. So, on Sunday morning, we awoke to a humdrum, 50-mile-per-hour tropical storm, but just moments before coming on the air yesterday, Channel 6 here in Miami, announced that it was a Category 5. So it escalated from a 50 mph storm one morning to a 160 mph Category 5 hurricane by midday the next day. So it’s just the severe, fast escalation that makes this one unique.
McKenzie: How odd is that?
Morales: So the normal pace of quick intensification is a 35-mile-per-hour rise in wind speeds over 24 hours. Here, it was more than doubled. Extreme fast intensification begins at 58 miles per hour every 24 hours. However, we saw 92 miles per hour in 24 hours. So you have normal intensification, then quick intensification, severe rapid intensification, and finally Milton. That’s what makes the system so amazing.
McKenzie: You have already written for the Bulletin regarding the accelerating intensity of hurricanes. Why does this make tropical storms more dangerous?
Morales: First and foremost, it allows for higher damaging wind speeds. In other words, when it rapidly intensifies, it becomes a potentially more destructive storm based just on wind. However, a larger wind speed will drive more water towards the coast. So, near storm-surge-prone coasts, a bigger hurricane will typically result in a deeper, wider storm surge, especially if the wind field extends as Milton is forecast to do. The other aspect of rapid intensification is that it may take populations off guard, implying that they are staring at a hurricane or possibly simply a tropical storm, and while forecasters may discuss, especially behind the scenes.
