Hurricane Milton Dips to Strong Category 4 Storm As it Heads for Florida Landfall

Hurricane Milton’s powerful winds are more expansive than they were on Tuesday morning, but these winds will grow even more leading up to and after landfall in Florida Wednesday night.

Milton was barreling across the Gulf of Mexico as a strong Category 4 storm, bordering Category 5, Wednesday morning on a path toward Florida’s central west coast, the National Hurricane Center said. It is currently expected to make landfall in the early hours of Thursday.

Milton’s sustained wind speeds dipped before 8 a.m. Eastern Time to 155 miles per hour, which is just 1 mph below the marker for Category 5. That was down sightly from 160 miles per hour recorded earlier Wednesday, when forecasters described it as a “catastrophic” hurricane.

“Fluctuations in intensity are likely while Milton moves across the eastern Gulf of Mexico, but Milton is expected to be a dangerous major hurricane when it reaches the west-central coast of Florida,” the Miami-based hurricane center said early Wednesday.

The National Weather Service in Tampa Bay described Milton as “a historic storm for the west coast of Florida” that could prove to be the worst to hit Tampa Bay in more than a century.

CBS News meteorologist Nikki Nolan said the latest forecast track shows Milton making landfall over or near Sarasota, Florida, after about 2 a.m. ET. Milton is expected to be a low-end Category 4 hurricane at the time, Nolan said, which would put its winds at the bottom of the 130-156 mph range.

Forecasts updated by the hurricane center Wednesday morning showed Milton tracking just off the coast of Florida, in Sarasota Bay, at around 5 a.m. Thursday. Its sustained winds will be about 130 mph at that point, they predicted. But the hurricane center also cautioned against following certain forecast details too closely, like the exact landfall location.

While more recent models point to Sarasota as Milton’s landfall spot, earlier projections suggested Milton could make landfall at Tampa Bay, raising serious concerns for a city vulnerable to storm surge that has not been in the direct path of a hurricane in at least 100 years.

“Users are urged not to focus on the exact landfall point as the average error at 24 hours is about 40 miles,” the hurricane center said.

After landfall, Milton will continue across Florida while rapidly weakening after losing the fuel of the warm Gulf waters, but still maintaining its hurricane status as it exits into the Atlantic Ocean before quickly transitioning into a tropical storm Thursday afternoon.

via: CBS News

The post Hurricane Milton Dips to Strong Category 4 Storm As it Heads for Florida Landfall appeared first on LOVEBSCOTT.