How Hurricane Idalia went from Category 1 to Category 4 overnight
Warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico helped fuel Hurricane Idalia’s rapid intensification hours before it made landfall, a phenomenon that experts say will likely occur more often in a warming world.
Warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico helped fuel Hurricane Idalia’s rapid intensification hours before it made landfall, a phenomenon that experts say will likely occur more often in a warming world.
As Idalia moved through the Gulf on Tuesday, its winds rose by 55 mph in just 24 hours, strengthening from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 4 by early Wednesday. It weakened slightly to a Category 3 hurricane before making landfall a few hours later in Florida’s Big Bend, near Keaton Beach.
But Idalia’s intensification as it approached the Florida coast is “to be expected with hotter ocean temperatures,” said Jeff Masters, a former hurricane scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who now works as a meteorologist for Yale Climate Connections.
The world’s oceans in recent months have shattered temperature records, with multiple bodies of water — including the North Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Basin — engulfed in severe marine heat waves.
Most of the eastern Gulf of Mexico has been 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average, with isolated spots along the coast, near where Idalia made landfall, up to 5 degrees above average, according to analyses of sea surface temperatures by tropical cyclone forecaster Levi Cowan on his website, Tropical Tidbits.
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