I have friends and family enduring the landfall of Hurricane Ian at this very moment. Two will lose their house as storm surge will be well above the rafters. They have evacuated and are with my sister and BIL further inland. The current windspeed is 150 mph.
This graphic illustrates the terror awaiting millions of people on Florida’s gulf coast.
Mindblowing.
Lara tRUMP traumatized her young son during a stroll in Miami as Ian’s outer bands arrived with intense electric activity and heavy rainfall in Miami.
Climate Changes fingerprints are all over Hurricane Ian.
From Chris D’Angelo writing in the Huffington Post:
In just a few days, Ian grew from a tropical storm to a major hurricane — a phenomenon known as “rapid intensification.” It slammed into Cuba on Tuesday, leaving a trail of destruction and knocking out power across the island nation. It then entered the Gulf’s warm waters, where it continued to rapidly gain strength as it took aim at Florida’s Gulf Coast. On Wednesday afternoon, the storm had maximum sustained winds of 155 mph — just 2 mph shy of a Category 5 — and was approaching landfall near Fort Myers.
Ian’s forecast has gone from bad to worse. Along with catastrophic winds, the hurricane is expected to unleash “life-threatening storm surge” of up to 18 feet and torrential rain of 20 or more inches in some areas, according to the National Hurricane Center’s latest update. Meteorologists and hurricane experts have described Ian as a “monster” and a “worst case scenario,” and have pleaded with Florida residents to flee the coast.
“This is a nightmare. We keep waking up to storms that do this near landfall,” Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia and a former president of the American Meteorological Society, wrote in a Twitter post Wednesday morning.
The 2015 National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report, concluded that “hurricane intensity and rainfall are projected to increase as the climate continues to warm.” A 2020 federal study analyzed satellite data over a 40-year period and found that planetary warming increased the likelihood of a tropical cyclone becoming a major hurricane ― Category 3 strength or higher ― by approximately 8% per decade. And a landmark United Nations report last year concluded that climate change is driving “an increase in the proportion of intense tropical cyclones” and that “the proportion of intense tropical cyclones (Category 4–5) and peak wind speeds of the most intense tropical cyclones are projected to increase at the global scale with increasing global warming.”
Research also shows there’s been a marked slowdown in hurricanes’ speed over both water and land, leading to increased risk of torrential rain, flooding and storm surge. Hotter sea surface temperatures have also allowed for hurricanes to maintain their strength for longer periods after making landfall.