Storm Chasers Capture Horror Of Hurricane Michael in Florida

The blue house was lifted off pilings where it had been on the right side
of this road. It was pushed across the Mexico Beach road and into a
larger condominium across the street. Photo via Twitter, @SimonStormRider

Simon Brewer and Juston Drake of StormChasingVideo on YouTube have what is perhaps the most horrifying video yet of Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Florida, where it made landfall

The video, which you'll see below, just shows the enormous power of the wind and what it can do. I'm speechless.

In one clip of the aftermath, I think I found the blue house that ABC meterologist Ginger Zee lost as a storm surge ripped the house for its mooring and rolled it past her condo and into the abyss of wind and rain.

The Brewer/Drake video show the blue house sitting in the middle of the main street through Mexico Beach.

I think the most haunting images, actually the sound, are clips they took in the immediate aftermath of Michael. All the smoke and burglar alarms are going off in the shattered houses and buildings around them. It is incredibly eerie.

 Here's the stunning video:

Buzzsaw Hurricane Matthew Was LIke An Immense Tornado

In the eyewall of Hurricane Michael. Photo by Joe Randle/Getty Images

Imagine if you were in your house when a strong tornado hit it.  You would cower in the your basement as the twister pulled the house to pieces, but the good news it is all over in a minute or so.

Imagine having to endure that for an hour or more.  

That's basically what people in and around Panana City, Florida had to deal with as Hurricane Michael came onshore yesterday.

IT WAS BAD

Maximum sustained winds in Hurricane Michael were 155 mph - just shy of Category 5, which would be the worst hurricane possible.  Videos taken in the Florida Panhandle of the 100 to 130 mph gusts that were common in region were just like videos I've seen taken inside of tornadoes.

Roof went airborne. Debris swirled everywhere. Scary stuff, made worse by an immense storm surge that sent walls of watering crashing through seaside towns. Storm surges reached over ten feet high as predicted, washing many neighborhoods completely away.

One person said Panama Beach looks like it has been nuked. A major U.S. Air Force base is in ruins.

There are several videos of news reports, the storm in full progress and the terrible aftermath at the bottom of this post.

It's amazing that as of this writing, I'm aware of only two deaths associated with Michael. I'm sure teh death toll will rise, but still, the casuality list is so far mercifully short.  Damage photos from the area look like it was hit by a 10 or 20 mile wide EF-4 tornado.

We've had a lot of unusual, and unusually strong hurricanes lately. This one fit that bill. Forecasters had known right along since at least Sunday Hurricane Michael would strengthen pretty steadily as it worked its way north across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida.

Wild close up satellite view of Hurricane Michael eye

The strengthening was stunning, however. The hope was that Michael would limit itself to a Category 2 storm. Instead, it was a much worse, high end Category 4 monster.

It was the third most powerful hurricane to hit the United States in centuries. Michael was the strongest hurricane to hit the U.S. since Camille in 1969.

Michael was yet another example of how forecasters have gotten much better at predicting the path of hurricanes, but we need work on predicting the strength.

The forecast was pretty good in this case, as the National Hurricane Center very early on caught on to the idea that Michael would strengthen.

They just had no idea it would get that bad. I'm sure researchers continue to study how to better forecast hurricane strength. If there's a tiny silver lining to Hurricane Michael, it is that it will probably provide more, valuable data to the researchers.

Nonetheless the National Hurricane Center, local National Weather Service meteorologists, broadcast meteorologists and emergency managers deserve a huge amount of credit. Their timely and increasingly strident warnings prompted a huge number of people to flee out of harm's way. That's why the death toll is so far surprisingly low.

Of course, we don't know to what extent, if any, climate change had to do with Hurricane Michael's strength. We do know the Gulf of Mexico water temperature was warmer than normal, which certainly fed Michael.  Was the water warm due to climate change, a normal cycle, a fluke or a combination?

From television station WFLA. Mexico Beach, Florida after Michael

As Scientific American points out, cold fronts usually start pressing in from the north and into the Gulf of Mexico by this time of year. These cold fronts stir up the atmosphere and increase upper level winds.

That disrupts hurricanes. The cold fronts add a bit of chill to the Gulf of Mexico waters, too. No cold fronts, no chill, no disruptive winds. Michael had a strangely perfect environment to strengthen. Which is weird for so late in the season.

Ocean water temperatures have risen all around the globe due to climate change, so we can suspect that had an influence on Michael. And why haven't the autumn cold fronts reached the Gulf of Mexico yet? Global warming or a fluke or both?  

Generally speaking, hurricanes that are relatively small in size have a greater chance of intensifying rapidly than big, sprawling storms. Michael was kind of small in area, so it was better able to take advantage of perfect atmospheric conditions to strengthen.

Michael actually reminded me a lot of Hurricane Charley, which behaved very much like Michael as it blasted into southwestern Florida in 2004.

Contrarians will say that climate change is not having an influence on hurricanes, or they'll say that climate change doesn't exist. They'll point to the fact there has been no real trendline in the number of hurricanes that pop up every year. True, but it does seem like many of the stronger ones are even more intense than they were previously.  

These contrarians will also say there have been plenty of tropical storms and hurricanes this year and previously that didn't amount to much, and behaved pretty much the way all tropical systems have in the past. That's all very true. But is something weird going on with these particularly strong ones?

Other hurricanes, like Harvey last year and Florence this year stalled an meandered, dumping incredible rains on Houston in 2017 and the Carolinas this year. There has been some research and more than some speculation that these stalls are influence by changes in the the jet stream. Which in turn have been influenced by global warming.

Some of our contrarians will point out, quite accurately, that Hurricane Michael moved right along. No stalls, no meanders, no loop de loops. It just plowed ashore and kept right on going to the Carolinas, where it was this morning as a tropical storm. Michael is still racing forward, and will move off the East Coast tonight.

If hurricanes are stalling, why didn't Michael? our contrarians will ask. Climate change doesn't nullify basic physics. Not all hurricanes will stall and meander. Most, like Michael, get picked up by upper level winds and steered briskly toward their destinations.

By the way, there is currently an aimlessly meandering hurricane out there. Hurricane Leslie, out in the central Atlantic Ocean, has been moving to and fro and not making much headway in any particular direction for more than a week now.  It's now moving back toward Africa, where it came front. Forecasters say it will weaken, and do another U-turn in a couple days.

Michael is still quite a danger, despite the fact that its 155 mph sustained winds are long gone. (Top sustained winds were 50 mph as of 8 a.m. today. Michael is still unleashing torrential rain and causing renewed flooding in the Carolinas.

Plus, as many dying tropical systems do when they're inland, there's a high potential that Michael will spin off tornadoes today in North Carolina and Virginia.

Now, some videos:

This video shows large masses of debris from wrecked homes  floating around in the storm surge:



The Washington Post gives a great overview of what it was like. Even the satellite image of Hurricane Michael's eye coming ashore is scary as hell:



ABC meteorologist Ginger Zee rode out the storm in a concrete condominium that held - barely.  Her report is fraught to say the least. Especially the part where she describes the blue house across the street just rolling away:



The following video is often blurry, but it's an aerial view of Mexico Beach, Florida. Utter devastation:

Category 4 Hurricane Matthew A Dangerous Worst Case Scenario

Satellite view of extremely powerful Hurricane Michael as
it approached the Florida Panhandle this morning. 

I was a little worried yesterday that Hurricane Michael might end up being more powerful than forecast.

Unfortuately, it's more powerful than expected. Much more powerful.

Hurricane Michael was a Category 4 storm with top winds of 145 mph as of 7 a.m. today.

Worse, it was still strengthening as of 8 a.m. this morning. The tops of the clouds near the eye of the storm were getting colder, which is a sure sign of strenthening. The central air pressure of Michael was also falling, meaning it's getting stronger.

If Michael comes ashore with 145 mph winds, it will be among the ten strongest hurricanes to make landfall anywhere in the United States. The area where it hits - probably near Panaman City - will never look the same.

To think that just five days ago, Michael seemed like a distant, minor threat. Now, it's a cataclysm. Another one in an era that has brought us some of the most destructive  hurricanes in U.S. history: This list is getting long and depressing: Harvey, Irma, Maria, Matthew. Sandy, Irene

The outer winds of Hurricane Michael were coming ashore in the Florida this morning. As I noted yesterday, this area has had a lot of hurricanes over the years. But this one is the strongest in memory.
A category 4 hurricane has never come ashore in the Florida Panhandle in records dating back to at least 1851.

The National Weather Service in Tallahassee put it starkly enough: "This will be a catastropjic event the likes of which this region has never seen."

The 145 mph winds will cover a relatively small area, as they do in most strong hurricanes. But destructive hurricane force winds will  cover a wide area. As of early this morning, the hurricane force winds extended out 45 miles from the center of Michael. Tropical storm force winds extended out 185 miles from the center.

The winds of all hurricanes diminish fairly quickly once they come ashore. But Michael is so powerful it will take quite awhile for the winds to spin down. That means hurricane force winds will plow into Georgia and tropical storm force winds will go all the way up into the Carolinas.  Michael will then pass off the East Coast by early Friday morning.

Best guesses are more than a million people will lose electricity from Florida to North Carolina.

Hurricane winds are often the most visually dramatic aspects of storms like Michael. We'll see a lot of  videos of it, I'm sure,since this storm is coming ashore during daylight hours.

Radar imagery of Michael at
7:10 a.m. today. 

However, storm surges are the most dangerous and most deadly aspects of hurricanes. The storm surge associated with super strong Michael will be beyond awful.  When the storm was still well off shore early this morning, Apalachicola, Florida had its fourth highest tide on record.

When the storm comes in, the storm surge will be ridiculous. If the storm comes ashore at high tide, the surge could be as much as 13 feet above normal levels.

Anybody who didn't evacuate from the storm surge zone will very likely die.  Storm surges flow violently, and have battering waves from the hurricane winds to boot. The water will also be laden with debris as it plows into shoreline neighborhoods.

I hope everybody is away from the coast by now. The mayor of Tallahassee, Florida said this morning it's now too late to evacuate. People just have to hunker down and hope for the best.

All hurricanes produce torrential rain. There will be stripe of four to eight inches of rain, with locally higher amount from the Florida Panhandle, across central Georgia, and into the Carolinas and southeastern Virginia.

As you remember, the Carolinas are still dealing with the catastrophic flooding and its aftermath from Hurricane Florence.  As of this morning, a southeasterly air flow off the Atlantic Ocean, arranged in part by the position of Michael, was dumping heavy showers on South Carolina.

This is going to be another extreme disaster. This, in a year we've had far too many.

Hurricane Michael Still Targeting Florida; Will Leave A Huge Mess

Satellite photo of Hurricane Michael from last night

Hurricane Michael was still chugging along in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico this morning, heading north for a rendezvous with the Florida Panhandle Wednesday afternoon.

Anybody who lives in that neck of the woods ought to really hurry  up and finish hurricane evacuations and preparations today.

This storm didn't give people all that much time to prepare. The danger only became apparent on Sunday.

Winds of tropical storm force will reach the Florida coast early tonight, so everybody has until about dinner time this evening to get their preparations all done.

A glimmer of good news is that Michael temporarily stopped intensifying last night, holding steady for several hours with sustained winds of 90 mph. Which is bad but could be worse.

Well, it IS getting worse. The 7 a.m. statement from the National Hurricane Center said winds had just ticked up to 100 mph in Michael.

The National Hurricane Center said Michael would probably continue strengthening today over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Relatively strong winds aloft which might be inhibiting Michael a bit will relax, giving the storm a better chance to get stronger before landfall.

By the time Michael reaches shore, it's possible its winds could be 120 mph. That's obviously very dangerous. Such winds are capable of wrecking even sturdy buildings and removing quite a few roofs. It looks like Panama City and maybe Tallahassee are screwed with this one.

As in most hurricanes, the biggest danger from Michael is the storm surge. As Bob Henson in his Category 6 blog points out, there's a lot of shallow water extending roughly 80 miles off the coast of the hurricane zone.

Winds on the east side of Michael will pile a lot of water into that shallow zone, so coastal storm surges could reach ten feet or more. Add battering waves on top of that and all those beachfront homes, condos, restaurants, tourist attractions and honky tonks are all in danger.

The Florida Panhandle is pretty flat, so the storm surge could go pretty far inland, too.

I think the people in the Florida Panhandle are taking this storm surge threat seriously, because this region seems particularly vulnerable to hurricanes with destructive storm surges. In recent history, hurricane storm surges have caused a lot of damage in instances like Hurricane Hermine in 2016, Dennis 2005, Ivan in 2004, Opal in 1995 and Kate in 1985.

The winds of all hurricanes diminish rapidly once they come ashore. But Michael will be picking up forward speed at landfall, so it will cover a lot of ground in Florida and southern Georgia before winds die down too much. The path of Michael over this region  will cover a lot of heavily forested ground, so tree damage will be immense.

Michael will race over the areas of the Carollnas devastated by Hurricane Florence, but it will be moving along so quickly that it will only slightly worsen the high water situation there. Then it will go off the coast and scream rapidly toward Europe as a very strong, non-hurricane storm. But out in the North Atlantic, the former Michael will be a beast, with perhaps 70 mph winds.

The path of Michael will take it much too far south of us here in Vermont to  have any effect on us.

Hurricane Michael A Big Threat To Florida Panhandle

Here's the projected path of soon-to-be Hurricane Michael
at least as of this morning. 

UPDATE 11 AM MONDAY

The National Hurricane Center says Michael, as expected, is now a hurricane. The 11 a.m. update has it at 75 mph.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION:

OK, the headline in this post is temporarily inaccurate.

As of this writing early Monday morning, Tropical Storm Michael was not yet a hurricane. But it extremely likely will be by later today, and it's a big threat to the Florida Panhandle.

This storm developed more quickly and more robustly than expected. Early yesterday morning it was a sloppy mess of a tropical depression, with top winds of just 30 mph. Yawn.

Forecasters thought at first it wouldn't strenghten too quickly, because upper level winds were preventing it from organizing. They figured it would get into the Gulf of Mexico, then rev up.

Nope, by the end of the day Sunday, Tropical Storm Michael had top winds of 60 mph, despite the high upper level winds, called wind shear, that were trying to rip the storm apart.

By this morning, top winds in Michael had increased to 70 mph. As Michael moves north into the Gulf of Mexico, the wind shear is expected to lessen, and the storm will be moving over very warm water.

That's a recipe for a very fast increase in intensity, and Michael could be a very dangerous hurricane by the time it reaches the Florida Panhandle late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. By this time it could be a Category 2 or 3 hurricane, with top sustained winds of 110 to 125 mph.

All that said, meteorologists and hurricane experts have gotten a lot better in recent years in predicting the track of hurricanes, but not so good at predicting a hurricane's strength.

That's not a slap or insult at the National Hurricane Center or any other meterologist. It's just that the science isn't there yet. We humans have not completely figured out the ins and outs of why or when a hurricane will strengthen or weaken.

All this means is that people in the Florida Panhandle can expect anything from a gusty storm that causes some damage to a hurricane with major damage.

The hurricane will move inland and the winds will quickly weaken during the day Thursday. It will move through the southeast, and go over or near the flood disaster zone in the Carolinas, left behind by Hurricane Florence.

Michael, or its remains will dump heavy rain on the Carolinas, which of course is really bad. The good news is that Michael, unlike stalled Florence, will zip right through, so it won't have the opportunity to dump heavy rain over the course of many days. It will pour during many hours, just not many days.

By the way, Michael won't affect us here in Vermont. It will be too far south. It'll rain here Thursday, but that will be because a cold front will be approaching, then passing through.

REMEMBER HURRICANE LESLIE?

Way back at the end of September, one of my blog posts mentioned the formation of Hurricane Leslie, way out over the central Atlantic.

Believe it or not, all this time later, Leslie is still there, alternating between tropical storm force and hurricane force, as its top winds fluctuated above and below 75 mph. Right now it's a tropical storm, with top winds of around 50 mph

It looks like Leslie will finally get moving, moving southeast, then east, then northeast across the central and eastern Atlantic Ocean.  It was over cool-ish waters this morning, which is preventing it from getting stronger, but soon it will move over warmer waters, and the National Hurricane Center thinks Leslie will become a hurricane again. 

Leslie could threaten Portugal and Spain toward next weekend. By then, Leslie will likely be converting itselt from a hurricane to a regular storm, albeit a strong and windy one. That's something those two countries need to keep an eye on.

HURRICANE SERGIO'S WET U-TURN

Meanwhile, out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Hurricane Sergio last week was heading harmlessly westward, where it would have encountered colder water and died. But then it did a U-Turn, and is heading toward Baja California.

It will have greatly weakened by the time it gets there, but it will probably end of pushing another surge of very odd, wet weather into the Desert Southwest.

That's bad, because the remains of Hurricane Rose set up lots of flash flooding in that region last week, especially in Arizona.

The Southwestern deserts are now oddly wet, so Sergio could set them up for a lot more flooding. Stay tuned on that one.

SPEAKING OF FLOODING....

There's a big risk of flash flooding today and tomorrow in a broad swath in the middle of the nation from western and central Texas all the way up to southern Minnesota and Wisconsin.

A nearlh stalled weather front is dumping heavy rain in the region. Today, the biggest threat of flash flooding is in parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, where the National Weather Service says there is a high risk of possibly life threatening flash flooding.

This region has been plagued by heavy rain for many weeks, and there have been repeated flash flood. This could be the worst round het in the three states I mentioned. We'll follow the news today and tomorrow to see where this goes.

Big Pattern Change Will Bring Cold Reality To Us Vermonters Next Weekend

Mount Mansfield and environs probably won't look like this later
this month, but in a about a week, I suspect there might be a little
snow or rime ice at the very top of the peak. 

It's going to be quite a warm week through Thursday here in the North Country, but don't get used to it. Winter is coming fast, and we will get a seasonable mini-taste of it by next weekend.

It's dank and drizzly today, and it will likely stay that way into Monday. But temperatures are at or a little above normal.

Tuesday and Wednesday will basically be Indian Summer, with highs right up there in the 70s.

Nights will be particularly warm. It'll be the last chance to keep windows open at night as lows will bottom out Tuesday and Wednesday nights to just around 60 degrees.

That's roughly normal for mid-summer.

Warmth has mostly dominated since May, and especially since late June, whe a northward bulge in the jet stream seemed to become almost permanent over the eastern United States.

This ridge will break down later this week to be replaced by a big dip, or trough in the jet stream.

This means it will turn cold. The details are still scant, but the upcoming chill doesn't look very out of the ordinary for mid-October. But it will be something we're not used to.

There's a good chance of hard freezes at night, and maybe a little snow on the mountain tops. It's unclear how long this cool or cold trend will last. But autumn is a season of see-saw ups and downs.

I'm betting we'll alternate between warm spells and increasingly harsh cold spells as we hurtle toward winter.

That's just the breaks here.

At least we here in Vermont aren't going to suffer through any kinds of dangerous or too-abrupt extremes this week.

The Central Plains and parts of the Midwest are in for some pretty bad flash flooding. During this week, especially today through Wednesday, a swath from Texas to Wisconsin is expecting three to seven inches of rain, with higher amounts in some spots.

This rain will fall on ground already saturated by a soggy late summer and fall. Lots of flooding is going to happen.

Meanwhile, a few spots in the northern Rockes, adjacent High Plains and the Black Hills of South Dakota are getting some fairly persistent snow over the next few days.

And a tropical storm or hurricane is likely to hit the Gulf Coast Wednesday or Thursday.

Yeah, good times.  

Gulf Coast Might Learn Hurricane Season Ain't Over; Meanwhile, Cloudy Vermont

Some potential tracks of wannabe Tropical Storm
Michael. It may or may not form, and don't
assume this forecast scenario is exactly right.
It could easily change. 

We're past the peak of hurricane season, but we've still got a ways to go before it's over. True to form, things might be heating up again in the tropical storm department.

In the late spring, then again in early fall, something called Central American Gyre often forms. Sounds scary, doesn't it? Well, it can be.

This gyre, which we will get all geeky about and called a CAG. is a broad, wet circulation of air that gets going in the southwestern Caribbean Sea. Our buddy CAG can produce torrential rain and terrible flooding in Central America.

Our CAG is also good at spitting out tropical storms and hurricanes in the Caribbean and off the west coast of Africa.  CAG seems poised to create a new tropical storm, which would be named Michael, if it does form.

Strong upper level winds around CAG will probably make any tropical storm fairly slow to develop, but a particularly concentrated area of bad weather in this region this morning seemed on the cusp of turning into a tropical depression, which is usually a precursor to a tropical storm or hurricane.

As always, the path of wannabe Michael is uncertain, but early indications are it wants to drift northward somwhere between Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and western Cuba and then eventually toward maybe the Florida Panhandle.

It's still unclear if wannabe Michael will get it's act together to form a hurricane, or just be a sloppy mess of downpours if and when it reaches the United States. But it's something to watch for next week.

CLOUDY VERMONT

We had a really sunny summer and early autumn in Vermont but lately the clouds are winning out.

Wispy clouds gave us a gorgeous sunrise over St. Albans, Vermont
Friday morning, but the clouds later increased, and we mostly
stuck under the clouds for the next few days.

That's typical. As we move through the autumn, it tends to get cloudier and cloudier until we hit November and December, when the days are so short and the skies are pretty much always overcast, which is pretty yucky.

But we deal with it every year.  

The clouds won out last night, which was actually a good thing. Had it stayed clear, as many forecasters had predicted, we would have had quite a bit of frost around. But the clouds kept us warmer than expected.

Keep those gardens cranking as long as you can, right?

The price we'll pay is a cloudy weekend. A cold front is slowly sagging southward, which will create plenty of clouds and scattered showers.

As the front sinks southward through the area Sunday, it will keep the clouds around. Also, an inversion is likely to develop.

Usually, the air gets colder the higher you go up in elevation. In an inversion, it gets warmer as you go up. That warm air on top of the cold air seals in the clouds, so you get a dreary mix of fog, low clouds and drizzle, which appears to be the fate for most of us on Sunday.

During the summer, the strong sun usually can break up an inversion by mixing up the air. In those cases the sun comes out by afternoon. But now, the sun is lower and weaker, so it won't be able to break up the inversion. You probably won't need your sunglasses on Sunday.

The clouds and drizzle look like they might continue into Monday. Then the inversion will finally break up. We might get some sun next week but it won't be wall to wall sun. It will get warmer, though.

Don't despair if you don't like the clouds. We still usually get spells of bright, sunny weather through the rest of the month of October and into early November. I'm sure that will happen this year.