Gone with the wind? Hurricane Milton means it’s time to Toss worn-out weather Forecasts

If you’re more than high school age, you’ll probably remember how hurricanes played out on TV. The fast-talking forecasters would point to their maps and satellite images and project – usually pretty accurately – where the storms were going and how much they were going to strengthen.
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Would the current tropical storm out there in the Atlantic, they prognosticated, grab one of the names given to these singular weather systems? Once in a while. And would said storm strengthen as it neared shallower waters and, in particular, wandered into the Gulf of Mexico (remember 2005’s Hurricane Katrina)? And would the excitable seers have an idea, quite far out, how fierce the hurricane would become?
Pretty much, yes.
But now, global warming, long on the cusp of sending hurricanes from, in essence, a seasonal menace, has transformed the storms from mostly predictable perils to short-notice disasters.
In other words, horrendous hurricanes seem to come out of nowhere.
Take Hurricane Helene for example, which hit Florida’s Big Bend region as a Category 4 crisis-causing disaster almost two weeks ago. How many days ahead of landfall were the meteorologists musing about its future? It hardly had any impact on CNN and it cohorts until it was clear what was happening.
And not only did it clobber the coastal region, but it also pounded the states to its north, including Georgia, Tennessee and most notably, western North Carolina. Do you recall such devastating damage triggered hundreds of miles inland by a hurricane?
Neither did they networks, hardly giving the cable TV folks time to pack their parkas and practice their swaying-in-the-wind-in-front-of-bent-trees routines.
And now we have what may become one of the biggest hurricane horrors of all time. Hurricane Milton comes with a somewhat nerdy name – sorry, Milton Berle – but the speed of its growing strength as it makes its way from just off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula to the crowded cities of west-central Florida makes it look like a mean macho man. Just this morning it was a Category 4 storm and then, seemingly in an instant, it was upped a notch at noon to the highest rank, packing 175-mph winds.
And there’s still hundreds of miles for it to go, still crossing the climate change-overheated waters of the Gulf. Will it become the equivalent of a Category 6 or 7, the creation of which were mulled last year by the National Hurricane Center, before being put back in the envelope?
At present, the aforesaid 175 mph is pretty much the highest wind speed that is talked about. But what if it were to head towards 200 mph?
With both forecasting and measuring, the new reality rouses new questions that cannot be given the same responses.
Be safe.
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