As the Wind Blows...

There's a good explainer here on what caused the rapid intensification of Hurricane Milton, why "bigger" doesn't necessarily mean "stronger" when it comes to hurricanes, and what's likely to happen over the next couple days as Milton continues to track to the northeast and encounters less favorable (for the hurricane) atmospheric conditions while still remaining over unusually warm Gulf waters...

The hurricane went from a Category 1 storm at midnight to a Category 5 hurricane by noon. And it didn’t stop there.

By 8 p.m. on Monday, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds had increased to 180 miles per hour, making Milton one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever. Based on wind speed, it joined a handful of other hurricanes to rival the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded: a 1980 hurricane named Allen, which had a peak wind speed of 190 m.p.h. before it made landfall along the United States-Mexico border.

As a small, compact system, however, Milton was more similar to Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which holds the record for the lowest pressure in a hurricane, another measure of a storm’s intensity. Its small size, an excess of extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and calm atmospheric conditions allowed Milton to “explosively” intensify, as hurricane center forecasters noted Monday afternoon.

The standard meteorological definition of “rapid intensification” is 30 knots in 24 hours, or roughly 35 miles per hour daily. Milton increased by more than double this definition on Monday, at a pace similar to that of Wilma and another record storm, Hurricane Felix in 2007.

It's funny that, like, the sixth post ever made at this blog, just over nineteen years ago, was about politics making people stupid about hurricanes...

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