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10 08 24 WeatherTiger Meteorologist Dr Ryan Truchelut on tracking Hurricane Milton
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Deciding on what to listen to is hard. Using Zoomo to stream music from iHeart90's radio is easy, or play iHeart Country or hip-hop beats. Your choice, all for free. Stream easy with Zoomo play. Get live and on-demand entertainment with no logins, no sign-ups, no accounts, no hassle. This November, get cozy and stay in from movie night with Air Force One starring Harrison Ford and Glenn Close, and The Art of War starring Wesley Snipes, all streaming free on Zoomo Play. Go to play.zumo.com now. Life is hard. Zoomo is easy. In the wake of the flood left by Hurricane Alene, less than two weeks ago, now Hurricane Milton, edging closer towards Florida's Gulf Coast. Especially around the Tampa area looking to be hit hard by a Category 4 storm, winds whipping up around 180 miles per hour, and joining us now from Florida's based hurricane forecasting group on the KOA common spirit health hotline, Weather Tiger. He's our chief meteorologist. It's Ryan Truchelette. Ryan, thanks for coming on with us this morning. Compare and contrast for us, Haleen versus Milton. Milton looks like and sounds like it's gonna be a little more intense. - Well, I mean, Haleen and Milton are going to go down as one of the worst one to punches. Hurricane hits back to back in Florida state history. There's really only been a couple of years, historically where there's been two major hurricanes, make landfall in Florida in one season, and 2024, it looks poised to join them. Now, Haleen was a huge storm. Haleen was very large. Travel storm force winds extended over 300 miles away from the center. So while Haleen was larger, its maximum sustained winds were a little bit lower. It was a Category 4 hurricane made landfall with 140 mile per hour sustained winds. Yesterday, Milton became one of the top five strongest Atlantic hurricanes of all time in the Gulf of Mexico. Maximum sustained winds peaked out at 180 miles per hour, category five on the Saffra Simpson hurricane wind scale. But Milton was very, very small yesterday. It was a tiny storm. Really, the travel of storm force winds only extended out about 50 miles away from the center. So, the difference is in structure between the two, although I would point out that as Milton moves northeast towards Florida tomorrow, it will expand not to the size of Haleen, but it will be a significantly larger storm by the time it gets to the state. Brian, why and how did Hurricane Milton become so strong so fast? Well, it really is a baffling question, honestly, to hurricane scientists. We're all kind of looking at this and shaking our heads, because this is about as fast as a hurricane has ever intensified in Atlantic hurricane history. Milton went from a tropical depression with 35 miles per hour sustained winds midday Saturday to a category five hurricane within 48 hours by midday yesterday. And what happened here is basically that Milton found this little pocket in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico where there was pretty low wind shear, lots of moisture in the mid levels of atmosphere to feed thunderstorm growth. And of course, extremely warm sea surface temperatures in the Gulf, a sea surface temperature still in the upper 80s, which is near record, very unusual for this time of year. So lots of fuel to work with in a favorable upper level environment. And this storm is just small enough that it was able to tap into all those kind of, all those local effects being on top of each other and in a way that really allowed it to get strong very fast. Brian, you said a couple of things that one, two punch of Haleen, and now Milton, you talk about unusual conditions. Why is this happening? - Well, I mean, the 2024 hurricane season was forecast to be a doozy. I mean, all the seasonal outlooks before the season began were for about double normal activity. And the reasons for that are twofold, primary reasons anyway. One is sea surface temperatures across the Atlantic, including the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, well above average. Water temperatures are not normally in the upper 80s in the Gulf of Mexico in October. And they're typically more in the lower or mid 80s. And that's really been true. We've been running two or three degrees above normal across most of what we call the Atlantic Basin all year. The other factor at play here is that we have a developing La Nina events in the Pacific Ocean. That's an area of cooler than normal waters kind of east, or sorry, west of South America along the equator. And when a La Nina develops, it tends to last for a long time, and it also results in there being less wind shear than normal over the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, specifically late in the hurricane season. So oftentimes these La Nina hurricane seasons, they will last into October and November. It's not unusual to see hurricane threats and hurricane landfalls in the state of Florida in the month of October. We're typically not dealing with the threat of, we're not dealing with the category fives. That is unusual. But, you know, this is not surprising that we're seeing a lot of late season activity this year. - What are your biggest concerns for the main areas? What are the biggest concerns? And for which areas is we're looking at Hurricane Milton right now? - Well, by far my top concern and the top concern of Hurricane scientists of the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center is storm surge in West Central Florida. Milton, even if maximum sustained winds come down a bit before it makes landfall and it makes landfall as a, say, a Category 3 hurricane, it's going to be very strong over the next 48 hours as it approaches land. And that's gonna push a wall of water across the southeastern Gulf of Mexico towards Southwest and West Central Florida. And that really isn't going to change even if the winds come down, the maximum winds come down a little bit right before landfall. So it's not typical for major hurricanes to make landfall in West Central Florida in the Tampa Bay area. There's only been one major hurricane in the last 170 years that's made landfall to kind of north of the Charlotte Harbor area. That was in 1921 when a hurricane hit about 25 miles north of Tampa and drove nine to 12 feet of storm surge into Tampa Bay. Now, as you can imagine, there weren't very many people living in the Tampa Bay area in 1921 and there's about three and a half million there now, many of whom are living a third of the housing units in Tampa Bay are within 10 feet of sea level. So that's well within the surge range for if Milton hits near or just north of Tampa Bay, it will be driving 10 feet plus of storm surge across heavily populated Hillsborough and Pinellas County. Of course, those concerns are the same further south. There's a lot of coastal development areas like Bradenton, Sarasota, Venice, Inglewood, Cape Coral. Those are all areas where there's a possibility of 10 or more feet of storm surge and a lot of people living below 10 feet above sea level. - Ryan, quick question to get out of here with you on. Is this a pattern we anticipate seeing? Is there any data that goes back 50, 100 years that this is just something that we cycle through every so often with mother nature? - Well, I mean, certainly what Central Florida has, this is not a normal storm direction that the storm is coming from. That's kind of the weird thing about this, the approaching Florida moving east northeast. Records show that there was a hurricane in 1848 that drove 12 to 15 feet of storm surge into Tampa. You have this storm in 1921. You know, what I will say about this one is that, I think, you know, the fact that this one got so strong so quickly, that's not really something that we have any record of happening at this time of year before. But, you know, the bottom line is that hurricane threats to the Tampa Bay region of direct lane falls are pretty rare, but they do happen historically. And we have to be prepared for them and react now that one is happening. - From the Florida-based hurricane forecasting group Weather Tigers, chief meteorologist Ryan Trusel. Ryan, thank you so much for your time this morning as a former Florida resident. Thanks for your reporting on this, your forecasting. Stay safe this week, we appreciate it. - All right, take care. - I have a way to make your morning more efficient. You can get caught up on the news in about seven minutes. That is my promise to you as the host of the seven podcast from The Washington Post. And in that time, I will run down seven stories, everything from the most important headlines to fascinating new information you might miss otherwise. My name's Hannah Jule. Go follow the seven right now, wherever you're listening. And we will get you caught up. - It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre base stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeart Christmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeart Radio on the Roku channel. Happy streaming. Deciding on what to listen to is hard. Using Zoomo to stream music from iHeart 90s radio is easy, or play iHeart Country or hip-hop beats. Your choice, all for free. Stream easy with Zoomo Play. Get live and on-demand entertainment with no logins, no sign-ups, no accounts, no hassle. This November, get cozy and stay in from movie night with Air Force One starring Harrison Ford and Glenn Close and The Art of War starring Wesley Snipes, all streaming free on Zoomo Play. Go to play.zoomo.com now. Life is hard. Zuma was easy.