Hurricane Milton makes landfall on Florida's coast, with deadly storm surge

Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday near Siesta Key along Florida's Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm, bringing powerful winds, deadly storm surge and potential flooding to much of the state, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center. 

Milton drew fuel from exceedingly warm Gulf of Mexico waters, twice reaching Category 5 status.

Siesta Key is a barrier island off the city of Sarasota with white-sand beaches and has about 5,500 residents. The community is about 113 kilometers south of Tampa. While Tampa did not take a direct hit, Hurricane Milton was still producing deadly storm surge and powerful winds in the area.

Nearly 700,000 customers were without power in Florida around the time Milton made landfall, according to PowerOutage.us. The storm is bringing deadly surge to much of Florida's Gulf Coast, including densely populated areas such as Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Fort Myers.

Why is Hurricane Milton so fierce and unusual

With its mighty strength and its dangerous path, Hurricane Milton powered into a very rare threat flirting with experts' worst fears.

Warm water fueled amazingly rapid intensification that took Milton from a minimal hurricane to a massive Category 5 in less than 10 hours. It weakened, but quickly bounced back, and when its winds briefly reached about 290 kilometers per hour, its barometric pressure, a key measurement for a storm's overall strength, was among the lowest recorded in the Gulf of Mexico this late in the year.

At its most fierce, Milton almost maxed out its potential intensity given the weather factors surrounding it.

That's not all. Milton's eastward path through the Gulf is so infrequent the most recent comparable storm was in 1848. Its track "is not unprecedented but it's quite rare," said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. "And of those that did that track, this is by far the most intense."

"It is unusual in a number of ways," Princeton University climate scientist and hurricane expert Gabriel Vecchi said. "This storm is probably going to be very unlike any storm anyone has experienced on the west coast of Florida."

So much of what makes Milton nasty is rooted in the warmer water of its birth and in human-caused climate change, scientists said.

Warm water fuels hurricanes. It's crucial that the surface water be at least 26 degrees Celsius and it helps incredibly when there's deep warm water.

The water at Milton's birth and along its path was around 30.5 degrees Celsius. That's almost 1 degree Celsius warmer than normal and near record levels, both on the surface and deep, McNoldy said.

"Part of the reason it was so warm is because of global warming," Vecchi said, though he added that last year's El Nino – a natural warming of ocean waters that influences weather worldwide – and other natural factors played a role. "Now the storm has a lot more energy to draw on."And then there's the track. Usually storms in the Gulf of Mexico start in the east and go west or just go north, but Milton is heading east-northeast, Vecchi said. That's because of a weather system in Canada and the U.S. East Coast that is pushing the westerly winds that are common in mid-latitudes down to where Milton is, where autumn wind from the west is less common.

"It's extraordinarily bad," McNoldy said.

(Cover: Wind and rain batter the area as Hurricane Milton approaches in Sarasota, Florida, the U.S., October 9, 2024. /CFP)