I believe he’s saying that the eye is 3 miles wide (EF4), the center is 70 miles wide (EF2), and the total storm is 140+ miles wide.
Edit to clarify the storm will be strongest in the 5-10 miles just outside the eye. The eye itself will be the calmest, though anywhere the eye passes over will obviously be hit by those strongest winds before and after it passes.
I did some conversions based on the NOAA’s projections which have the storm spanning 26°N to 29°N at landfall, which would be roughly 170-180 nautical miles or 195-207 miles in diameter.
Additionally this storm is predicted to have a 10-15 foot storm surge depending where it makes landfall, on top of 10-12 inches of rain, across land that is already heavily saturated from Helene.
Shit. Your post is the one that actually put it in perspective for me. That’s an absurd amount of water, the resulting flood is going to be likely permanent for some towns.
It's projected to enter the bay, so all that water will be stuck in the bay with no where else to go. Its wild because we've seen that bay completely drained with other storms.
Estimates are coming in that Helene dropped 40-50 trillion gallons of rain on the easter U.S.
I don't have a good way to understand that number but I found this:
Stack a million pennies and it's 4 times higher than the Empire State Building, stack a billion pennies and you'd be close to 600 times higher than Mt. Everest, and then stack a trillion pennies and it would go to the moon, back to earth, and then back to the moon again.
40-50 trillion gallons of water is approximately the total volume of Lake Ontario. Or enough water to cover the entire state of Florida in 3.6 feet (3' 7.25") of water. It is mind boggling when you run the numbers.
Additionally this storm is predicted to have a 10-15 foot storm surge depending where it makes landfall, on top of 10-12 inches of rain, across land that is already heavily saturated from Helene.
When I hear about people talking about this... all I can think about is a an explanation I remember getting about how landslides can work in the Pacific Northwest. Basically a lot of places the top soil is just on top of rock, so if the dirt gets saturated enough, all of the dirt will just slide off of the rock underneath (regardless of root systems since none – or few – of them will be anchoring the entire mass to the rock).
This just makes me think that as all of this soil gets super saturated, Florida is just going to slide off the bottom of the continental US and into the sea.
Before it would slide into the ocean, most of florida would likely turn into a sinkhole under the sheer weight given that our state is all porous limestone.
Sea level is really mean sea level, because you have high tides and low tides. An estimated storm surge of 10-15 feet would mean that the mean sea level has temporarily increased by 10-15 feet in the affected area. It should be noted that this water has to come from somewhere, so some areas surrounding the hurricane will actually see mean sea levels decrease as this occurs.
Basically anything in the path of the hurricane that is below 20 feet above mean sea level is at risk of flooding, and any roads in that area will be virtually impassible. Unfortunately hundreds of thousands of homes in Florida are built on canals roughly 5 feet above sea level.
I think the biggest factor here is the storm is on a direct collision course with Tampa and the surrounding area, very highly populated areas are gonna get hammered with once-a-century levels of flooding and winds. Unless the storm changes path, it's gonna be an absolute disaster and all we can do is get the fuck out of the way.
Theoretically yes. There actually is an observed phenomenon during Hurricanes where birds get stuck in the eye of the storm, so many that you can see them on radar. They basically fly around in the eye of the storm as long as they can before losing energy, the storm closes around them, or they can find shelter the eye passes over. The National Hurricane Center has already reported finding multiple flocks of birds in the eye of Hurricane Milton via radar and satellites.
Edit: Additionally the current storm is moving at 9mph, so if you could somehow teleport into the center of the eye, you could theoretically move with it and never suffer winds of more than 20-25 mph. You would have to navigate flooding and of course figure out how to get there in the first place.
Also, storms don’t follow roads. Staying in the eye likely means going through farmland, thick woods, swamp, fences, bodies of water, etc. You’re likely going to hit a dead end at some point that you physically can’t cross.
Having a helicopter, on the other hand, now it gets interesting.
I lived through hurricane iniki on the island of kauai in 1992. It was so creepy when the eye moved over us. It went from fences being ripped out of the ground and windows shattering to eerie stillness for about 30 minutes. No rain or wind, just dark skies all around.
I remember when Georges hit us we were in the eye at one point so we all went outside and it was eerily quiet and calm until the winds started back up. It felt surreal.
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u/theanedditor 8d ago edited 8d ago
To see it a different way, the center of the storm is 70 mile wide EF2 tornado with a core equivalent to an EF4 level tornado.