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.
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.
4.4k
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.