October 6, 2024
The situation has changed very quickly since my last update on Friday. Milton became a tropical depression on Saturday and a tropical storm soon thereafter. Currently, Milton is a strong category 1 hurricane with 85 mph winds. Milton is forecast to make landfall along the Florida Peninsula on Wednesday somewhere in the vicinity of Tampa, +/- 50 miles or either side. The storm is forecast to be a 145 mph category 4 hurricane 48 hours from now and the NHC warned this may still be a conservative estimate. Milton is forecast to weaken somewhat before landfall but just how much is uncertain. It is currently a small storm but as it weakens it may grow much larger, with the wind field expanding over a much larger area.
This is going to be a very bad situation for those along the West Coast of Florida and for a large part of the Peninsula. Those along the coast have barely started recovering from Helene and for some people it is about to get much worse.
This to me was a bit of a miss. We knew there could be another storm in the Gulf before Helene made landfall. Originally it looked like development would happen in the middle of the past week, but as that got closer those chances faded and moved out in the future. The update I wrote on Tuesday the 2nd did mention development was possible over the weekend but the strongest signal was for development around Tuesday or Wednesday. On top of that there weren't very many strong solutions early last week. Then this past Thursday and overnight into Friday everything changed, with every major model forecasting development. Less than 48 hours after the NHC had a 30% chance of development in the Gulf we had a named storm. The intensity has taken a lot of people by surprise as well. Even when development of Milton was imminent several forecasters I trust were only calling for a strong tropical storm or minimal hurricane at most, now we're looking at a category 4 or 5 storm in the Gulf in a few days. We've all seen that October storms can be very strong, so in that respect this is no surprise, but I don't think anybody was expecting this a few days ago.
This will be my last update on Milton, but please let me know if you have any questions. I do post more frequently on Twitter (X) and Facebook, so you're welcome to follow me there. Beyond Milton we may need to keep watching the Caribbean for development of maybe two more systems before the end of the month.
Have a good week.
Chris
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