Early Tuesday morning, Tropical Storm Idalia strengthened into Hurricane Idalia, charting a course for Florida’s west coast and panhandle. Its most sustained winds have already reached almost 100 miles per hour, and it’s anticipated to maintain feeding on exceptionally heat ocean waters and intensifying earlier than making landfall early Wednesday.
It should pound Florida—together with closely populated Tampa Bay—with a trifecta of compounding hazards: excessive winds, pouring rains, and an enormous storm surge, which might attain as much as 15 ft. The Nationwide Hurricane Heart expects that “life-threatening” surge to convey “catastrophic impacts.”
Whereas most individuals perceive {that a} hurricane brings wind and rain, the storm surge aspect is what causes excessive hazard to coastal communities. That’s what occurs when a storm turns into a large, swirling bulldozer that pushes a wall of water towards the shore. “The entire Gulf Coast of Florida—peninsula and panhandle—is without doubt one of the most storm-surge-vulnerable areas of the US, and even the world,” says Rick Knabb, a hurricane skilled on the Climate Channel and former director of the Nationwide Hurricane Heart. “The one manner to make sure you survive a storm surge—particularly a catastrophic storm surge, which is what we’re anticipating within the Florida Massive Bend and Apalachee Bay tomorrow morning—is to not be there when it occurs.”
Any hurricane feeds on heat water: Heat, moist air rises off the ocean floor, sending vitality into the environment. That moisture condenses into clouds and thunderstorms and releases its latent warmth, warming the core of the storm. That in flip lowers air stress, which will increase winds, which will increase how a lot water the system can evaporate off the ocean.
Idalia has been feeding on hovering ocean temperatures. “It is a machine that more and more takes benefit of an rising quantity of warmth and moisture that it is extracting from the ocean,” says Knabb. “Temperatures are manner up into the 80s and close to 90 levels in lots of components of the jap Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf is at all times heat sufficient to assist hurricanes, however this 12 months is manner hotter than common, and in lots of areas at document ranges.”
Typically, local weather change is dramatically warming the world’s oceans, offering gas for extra-powerful hurricanes. However atmospheric dynamics are at play, too: Commerce winds have been gradual currently within the tropical Atlantic and throughout the Caribbean. These winds would sometimes churn up deeper, cooler waters. However with much less of that upwelling, the waters within the Caribbean and round Florida have been heating like a pot on gradual boil. “All of that has been festering for weeks and weeks,” Knabb says. “And now these waters are being utilized by this hurricane to gas it.”
As Idalia chugs towards Florida, its winds are pushing a column of saltwater towards shore. The stronger the winds, the upper the water might be. The hurricane’s low stress can also be making a form of offshore dome of water centered beneath the storm. The water rises as a result of there’s much less atmospheric stress on the ocean there. “That dome peaks proper beneath the attention, the place you’ve got very low stress,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher on the College of Miami. “When the hurricane makes landfall, that dome of ocean water comes together with it.”