Hurricane Helene, now a Class 2 storm, is churning throughout the Gulf of Mexico, a bit of greater than 300 miles southwest of Tampa, Florida. Forecasters predict the hurricane — which as of Thursday morning has most sustained winds of close to 100 miles per hour — will quickly intensify within the subsequent 24 hours earlier than ramming into western Florida late Thursday as a monstrous storm.
“There’s a hazard of life-threatening storm surge from Tropical Storm Helene alongside your entire west coast of the Florida Peninsula,” the Nationwide Hurricane Heart mentioned early Wednesday morning.
The Nationwide Hurricane Heart predicts storm surge as excessive as 20 ft in some elements of Florida’s Huge Bend, a area between the panhandle and the peninsula. Precipitated largely by wind pushing water inland, storm surge is probably the most harmful a part of tropical storms; it killed greater than 40 folks throughout Hurricane Ian in 2022. The storm can be anticipated to inundate inland areas throughout a lot of the southeastern US with rain, dumping a foot or extra in elements of southern Appalachia.
Helene might additionally disrupt a part of the epic monarch butterfly migration, which generally passes by means of the Huge Bend’s St. Marks Nationwide Wildlife Refuge in early October.
Helene is the eighth named storm in what has to this point amounted to a considerably puzzling hurricane season. It began with a bang — June’s Hurricane Beryl turned the earliest Class 5 storm on report — after which a lot of August and September was unexpectedly quiet.
Many meteorologists, although, have been warning to not be fooled by this late-summer lull.
“Having multi-week durations of quiet after which multi-week durations of exercise may be very regular all through a hurricane season,” Brian McNoldy, a climatologist on the College of Miami, informed me earlier this month. “I undoubtedly wouldn’t learn an excessive amount of into it.”
Plus, McNoldy mentioned, the ocean within the Gulf of Mexico has been — and nonetheless is — exceptionally sizzling, and sizzling water fuels hurricanes. Ocean warmth content material, a measure of how a lot warmth vitality the ocean shops, is at a report excessive for this time of 12 months.
Check out the chart under. The pink line is 2024 and the blue line is the typical over the past decade.
That is particularly regarding proper now, given the forecasted path of Helene.
All that ocean warmth might supercharge the storm because it travels throughout the Gulf on its technique to Florida, probably inflicting it to “quickly intensify.” That’s when wind speeds enhance by roughly 35 mph or extra in lower than 24 hours. Forecasters predict that Hurricane Helene might hit Florida as a Class 3 or 4 system.
“The sea floor temperature and the ocean warmth content material are each report excessive within the Gulf,” McNoldy, who produced the chart above, informed me. “That warmth on the floor and obtainable by means of a depth will give Helene all of the gasoline it must quickly intensify immediately and into tomorrow.”
The report Gulf temperatures are only one sign of a extra widespread bout of warming throughout the North Atlantic that ramped up final 12 months.
It’s not completely clear what’s inflicting this warming, although scientists suspect a mix of things together with local weather change — which raises the baseline ocean temperature — in addition to lingering results of El Niño, pure local weather variability, and even perhaps a volcanic eruption.
“That is out of bounds from the sorts of variability that we’ve seen in [at least] the final 75 years or so,” Ben Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, a joint initiative of the College of Miami and the Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), informed Vox in August. “That may be scary stuff.”
Replace, September 26, 9 am: This story, initially revealed September 25, has been up to date with new info as Hurricane Helene approaches the Florida coast.