Hurricane Milton shows signs of being 'unnatural disaster', US meteorologist warns
An atmospheric scientist in the path of Hurricane Milton spoke to Yahoo News about what makes this impending disaster so intense.
Hurricane Milton is set to directly hit Florida’s Tampa Bay region forcing more than 1 million people to evacuate. While many have labelled the extreme weather event a “natural disaster” one leading expert living in the path of the storm argues the state is facing something much worse this time.
“It’s not a natural disaster. It's an unnatural disaster,” meteorologist and atmospheric scientist Dr Daniel Gilford told Yahoo News on Tuesday evening (local time) from Orlando. He leads hurricane research at Climate Central, an organisation that has been monitoring how Hurricane Milton underwent an historically rare phenomenon called 'extreme rapid intensification'.
When this occurred, sea surface temperatures were at or above record-breaking highs, which Climate Central has found were between 400 and 800 times more likely to have been caused by climate change.
“A warm atmosphere is a wetter atmosphere, and what goes up must come down,” Gilford said.
“We have more water in these storms to begin with, and as they move over a region, they can wring that water out of themselves and dump it in a location like we saw with Hurricane Helene,” he said in reference to the Category 4 hurricane that hit Florida in September, killing over 220 people and causing widespread damage.
Related: Zoo evacuates dozens of animals as Hurricane Milton approaches
The US National Hurricane Center has warned, “Milton has the potential to be one of the most destructive hurricanes on record for west-central Florida.” It's expected to make landfall at 9am Florida time (12am Thursday AEDT).
What's so 'special' about Hurricane Milton?
Florida and five other states were still cleaning up from Helene when Milton intensified on Monday, peaking at sustained speeds of 289 km/h and gusts of 322 km/h later that day as it travelled through the Gulf of Mexico.
“What’s so special about Milton is that it changed from Category 1 to Category 5 in less than a day. This is one of the steepest drops in central pressure, one of the biggest rises in wind speed — two ways we used to measure intensity.” Gilford said.
“This storm went from not very intense to an extremely intense storm almost up to its thermodynamic limit. What I mean by that is that most hurricanes have a speed limit at which they can spin, and that speed limit is set by how warm and wet their environment is.
The fact that this hurricane jumped from just a tropical storm, then a Category 1, and then all the way to a Category 5 in such a short period of time really shows how conducive this environment was for spinning that storm.”
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Climate expert concerned about friends and family in Tampa
Gilford grew up in Tampa and still has friends and family in the city. “People are taking it very seriously there, and I remain concerned for them,” he said.
“While he’s not concerned about flood impacting his office in Orlando which sits on higher ground 137 km from Tampa, he’s worried about potential tornadoes, extreme heat and loss of power after it makes landfall.”
Thousands flee Hurricane Milton, causing traffic jams and fuel shortages
Clearwater Beach residents prepare to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Milton
Historically, disaster movies have focused on one single event threatening the survival of a human population. But today, because of the impact of climate change — bushfires, floods and storms are becoming more severe. On average there are around 6,800 nature-based disasters every year, and that number is growing because of climate change.
“We used to have a billion-dollar disaster on average once every 60 to 100 days 50 years ago, but this year, we have had a billion-dollar unnatural disaster every nine days in the United States,” Gilford said.
“Climate change is getting expensive… so how are we going to work together to solve it?”
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