A massive tropical storm named Helen, Now a Category 1 hurricanechurning across the Caribbean near Cuba and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Forecasters predict the hurricane — which has maximum sustained winds — will continue until Wednesday morning 80 miles per hour – will rapidly intensify over the next 24 hours before hitting West Florida late Thursday as a severe storm.
“Deadly storm surge threat from Tropical Storm Helen along entire west coast of peninsular Florida,” National Hurricane Center said Early Wednesday morning.
The National Hurricane Center forecasts that the storm surge will be higher As 15 feet In parts of Florida’s Big Bend, an area between the Panhandle and the Peninsula. Primarily caused by the inward shock of air and water, storm surges are the most dangerous part of tropical storms; It’s murder More than 40 people During Hurricane Ian in 2022.
Helen may also disrupt part of the epic monarch butterfly migration, which typically passes through Big Bend’s St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in early October.
Helen is the eighth named storm to make a quantity so far A bit confusing The hurricane season started off with a bang — June’s Hurricane Beryl became the first Category 5 storm on record — and then was unexpectedly quiet for most of August and September.
Many meteorologists, however, caution not to be fooled by this late-summer lull.
“Multi-week calm followed by multi-week activity during a hurricane season is very normal,” Brian McNoldya climatologist at the University of Miami, told me earlier this month. “I certainly wouldn’t read too much into it.”
Also, McNoldy said, the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico was — and still is — exceptionally warm, and warm water fuels hurricanes. Ocean heat content, a measure of how much heat energy the ocean stores, is at a record high for this time of year.
See the chart below. The red line is 2024 and the blue line is the average of the last decade.
At the moment, especially the topic, given Helen’s predicted path.
All that ocean heat could supercharge the storm as it moves across the Gulf on its way to Florida, potentially “rapidly intensifying.” When wind speed increases to about 35 mph or more in less than 24 hours. Forecasters predict that Hurricane Helen could hit Florida as a Category 3 or 4 system.
“Give sea surface temperature and ocean heat content are both record highs in the Gulf,” McNoldy, who created the chart above, told me. “The heat available at the surface and through depth will give Helen all the fuel she needs to intensify rapidly today and tomorrow.”
Record Gulf temperatures are a signal of a broader bout of warming across the North Atlantic that has intensified over the past year.
It’s not entirely clear what’s causing this warming, although scientists suspect a combination of factors, including climate change — which raises baseline ocean temperatures — as well as the lingering effects of El Niño, natural climate variability and possibly a Volcanic eruptions.
“It’s beyond the range of the kind of variability we’ve seen [at least] For the past 75 years or so Ben Kirtmandirector of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, a joint venture between the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Vox in August. “It can be scary stuff.”
