,Less than two weeks after that Hurricane Helene torn through the Southeastern United Stateswhich kills and perhaps causes more than 200 people hundreds of billions of dollars in property and economic damage Hurricane Milton surfaced in the Gulf of Mexico and took aim at Florida. Milton reached Category 5 status on Monday with winds as high as 180 mphand it is expected to cause widespread flooding with torrential rain and a large storm surge when it makes landfall, likely around Tampa Bay on Wednesday.
How Milton got to this point is even more remarkable. A hurricane undergoes “rapid intensification” if its sustained wind speed jumps by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours. Helene did this before making landfall in the Big Bend region of Florida’s west coast. But Milton’s intensification was nothing short of explosive: wind speeds skyrocketed 90 mph in 24 hours – at one point managing a 70 mph jump in just 13 hours — leave meteorologists and researchers amazed.
This is one of the fastest intensification events that scientists have ever observed in the Atlantic Ocean. Even sophisticated hurricane models didn’t see it coming. “It’s definitely unusual,” said Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist who studies hurricanes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “The storm barely formed on October 5th, and on October 7th it’s a Cat 5 hurricane. It’s very impressive.”
Like Helene before it, Milton formed under the perfect conditions for rapid intensification. A hurricane’s fuel is high ocean temperatures, and the Gulf of Mexico has been a hot bath in recent months, with temperatures exceeding 80 degrees Fahrenheit. well above average numbers. “Sea surface temperatures in this area are near record, if not record breaking,” said Daniel Gilford, who studies hurricanes at Climate Central, a nonprofit research organization. “It’s actually a little hard to say.”
That’s because of an unfortunate irony: Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville, North Carolina, where the National Centers for Environmental Information stores data on ocean temperatures. “The sea surface temperature data that we rely on to make our daily climate attribution calculations is actually not available to us,” Gilford said. “It’s been off for about 11 days now because of Hurricane Helene.”
Losing access to that data makes it harder to calculate how much climate change contributed to Milton’s intensification. But Gilford can say with confidence that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have been made at least 100 times more likely due to climate change, and that’s a conservative estimate.
Hurricanes also like high humidity, which Milton has plenty of. And low wind shear – winds moving at different speeds at different heights in the atmosphere – meant that Milton could organize and turn nicely. “There is nothing that hinders the storm from the atmospheric point of view,” said Balaguru.
Milton’s extreme intensification has the fingerprints of climate change all over it. For one, as the atmosphere warms, so do the oceans, providing large pools of fuel for hurricanes. Scientists also find that changes in atmospheric patterns have reduced wind shear in coastal regions. A difference in temperature between land and sea also creates circulation patterns that boost the amount of humidity in the atmosphere.
So with higher humidity, warmer oceans and weaker wind shear, hurricanes have everything they need to rapidly intensify into monsters. Indeed, scientists is finding a dramatic increase in the number of rapid intensification events near the coast in recent years. This makes hurricanes all the more dangerous: A coastal community might prepare to ride out a Category 1 storm only for an unsurvivable Category 5 to suddenly come ashore.
In general, a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, so hurricanes have more moisture to wring out as rain. A recent study found that climate change caused Helene to crash 50 percent more rainfall in parts of Georgia and the Carolinas. Gilford expects climate change to also boost the rainfall Milton dumps on Florida.
As Helene did in Big Bend, Milton is expected to push a storm surge of perhaps 15 feet ashore along Florida’s west coast. This is partly a result of the gentle slope from the coast into the Gulf of Mexico: If the water was deeper, the storm surge could flow into the depths. But in this case the storm surge has nowhere to go but inland. The surge in Tampa Bay can be especially dangerous, as it acts like an overflowing bowl.
As a result, the National Weather Service is warning that Milton could be the worst storm to hit the Tampa area in more than a century. Milton may not just be an immediate emergency for Florida—it may well be a harbinger of the supercharged hurricanes to come.
