Soon To Be Hurricane Milton Menacing Florida, But LOTS Of Forecast Questions Remain

Satellite view of Tropical Storm Milton just after 
dawn broke over it. Milton had "that look" suggesting
it would strengthen fast. Notice that "lumpy" appearance
of the clouds near the center. Those are aggressive,
powerful thunderstorms that are building the eyewall
and ensure the storm will keep getting more powerful.

As of early this morning, Tropical Storm Milton was still gaining strength and organizing in the western Gulf of Mexico.   

Most forecasters agree this will be a formidable hurricane, but what exactly does it mean for Florida?

We know the broad brush answer, and it isn't good. Floridians can expect a scary, deadly storm surge somewhere on its west coast, with destructive winds too. Oh, and lots of inland flooding. 

It's already been raining hard in parts of Florida and that will continue right up through the time Milton sweeps through Florida on Wednesday. 

So we know it's bad, but picky little details and questions about the forecast make everybody wonder how bad and where. 

Before we get there, we have a small, but extremely wet system out ahead of Milton in the eastern Gulf of Mexico this morning. It's not a tropical storm and won't become one. But it's creating enough lift and deep moisture so that areas around Miami and Fort Lauderdale could get six or more inches of rain today and tonight. 

They already had one to three inches of rain yesterday, so the pump is primed for urban flooding. near southeastern Florida to deal with. East winds will tend to pile ocean water against those coastal location, hindering the ability for rainfall to drain off.

It'll keep raining in Florida through the time Milton arrives, too.

MILTON ITSELF

Hurricane hunter planes flew into tropical storm Milton early this morning and found a strengthening system already. Winds had increased from 50 mph at a 4 a.m. advisory to 60 mph by 7 a.m. based on what the hurricane hunters found.

Milton is forecast to rapidly strengthen into a hurricane today and become a major hurricane in the central and eastern Gulf of Mexico by later Monday and Tuesday.

Then what?

Given the fact that Milton will be approaching Florida as a major hurricane, at least part of the state is screwed. We know that. What we don't know quite yet is exactly where Milton makes landfall. And will upper level winds and a cold front to the north start to weaken Milton right before it hits the coast. If it does weaken, how much? Again, if it does weaken, will it matter that much?

The worst case scenario is that Milton comes ashore in or just a wee bit north of Tampa Wednesday as a major hurricane with winds of 120 mph or more. If that happens, a catastrophic storm surge would roar into this highly populated area.  

Tampa Bay is big, and a southwest blast if Hurricane Milton is just to the city's north would pile up enormous amounts of water in that bay. It would be beyond scary. 

Hurricane Helene in late September caused the worse storm surge in and near Tampa since either 1921 or 1848, when far fewer people lived there. The Tampa Bay area is still trashed from Helene's storm surge.  In this worst case scenario, Helene's storm surge would look like gentle waves compared to what Milton would bring. 

The best case scenario would be Milton rapidly weakening on approach to Florida. This would still be very bad, because you'd still get a deadly, super destructive storm surge in areas still picking up the pieces from Helene.  There'd still be major inland flooding from up to a foot of rain. 

High winds would pick up all that debris left from Helene and blow it around, making the damaging gusts even more destructive. All in all, the best case scenario isn't all that great. 

The National Hurricane Center said this morning forecasts models are all over the place. A few only bring Milton up to Category 1 (74 to 95 mph ) strength, while others say Category 5, (more than 155 mph) with many others in between.

Some of the models weaken Milton quite a bit just before landfall, other models have it coming ashore at almost top strength.

Exactly where will Milton land? This far ahead of a typical hurricane landfall, the average error in pinpointing the landfall is 150 miles. Milton could come ashore anywhere between a little north of the Keys to well north of Tampa.

If you live in Florida, especially along or near the west coast, get your hurricane preparations going today. Know evacuation routes and where you'd go if told to get out. Stock up on supplies like non-perishable foods and water in case the power goes out for a long time. 

The state of Florida does have an excellent hurricane preparedness guide, click here to see it. 

By the way, once Milton is done with Florida, it looks like it will rocket eastward out into the Atlantic Ocean. That means the storm would have no effect on north Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee where Hurricane Helene produced those catastrophic floods. 

To add insult to injury - and I want to stress before hand the following scenario is quite unlikely - one computer model brings another hurricane across Florida around October 18.  Again, I'm doubtful that will happen, but it's a reminder that hurricane season is not over even after Milton departs. 

A Year After Cataclysmic Vermont Flood, We Get Another One As Climate Gangs Up On Us.

Now that the weather has finally settled down, I've had a chance to think about the two big July flood disasters Vermont experienced on the same date two years in a row.  

Somebody's little piece of Vermont heaven was trashed by
the raging Huntington River on July 11. Similar scenes -
many much worse than this, were once again
common across Vermont this month. 

 We spent the day this July 11 marking the first anniversary of one of the worst flood on record in Vermont by....... picking up the pieces after another deadly Vermont flood.  

It does seem like it's harder and harder to catch one's breath between new weather extremes.  Flooding after July 10, 2023 continued sporadically through the rest of that month and on into August. 

Last year's summer disaster was followed by more rough, scary, disheartening weather. We had another destructive flood in December, twin windstorms that spread further damage in January, and severe thunderstorms and flash flooding in central Vermont just on June 23 -less than month ago.

And never mind the other extremes that didn't cause so much harm but had us weirded out: The hottest October day on record, the warmest winter on record, and damaging wet snowstorms in December and April. It goes on and on.  

This year, the subsequent series of storms following July 10 haven't been as damaging as last year's.

So far, anyway. 

A RECKONING

A year after the July, 2023, and just before the torrents hit again earlier this month, Vermont looked largely tidied up. 

A snippet of a Carly Simon lyric pops into my head here, "Close the wound, hide the scar."  The line from the song is about emotionally wounded people putting on a brave face.  

Which is where I think Vermont was on July 9.  And maybe will be again this time next year.  

Behind closed doors, people were still  still living in homes whose insides are still had not been repaired.  Business owners and home owners teeter on the edge of financial ruin from the flood's cost.  Farmers, always on the edge and at the mercy of the weather more than pretty much all of us, wonder if they will make it.   

A sign outside a church in flood-ravaged Johnson,
Vermont in July, 2023

People like this are out of the headlines, except of course when we're marking the anniversary of the disaster. 

The Associated Press's profile of one woman's current life a year after the flood is pretty harrowing. I'm stressed out just reading it. 

"Lisa Edson Neveu and her two teenage sons still live in their flood-wracked home, despite unrepaired damage that festers like an open wound: Torn-out walls and floors, a missing ceiling in one room and a downstairs bathroom that is no more. The family's kitchen was destroyed, so they cook meals on an outdoor grill, an electric frying pan and an air fryer."

The immediate aftermath wasn't the real problem. Neighbors helped neighbors, the National Guard really stepped up to the plate. But then that was it. 

They were on their own to fight insurance companies, the adjusters, FEMA, state and local regulations, you name it.  A Vermont flood typically comes and goes in a day. The aftermath lasts forever. 

At least Neveu didn't have to start from square one with murky water in her house again. Montpelier avoided another calamity this time. 

 Not so in Barre. Or Waterbury. Or other towns victimized again the night of July 10-11.  I heard one clip on the radio of somebody in Barre saying they hadn't finished cleaning up the debris from the July 2023 flood when this one hit. 

The sudden transition from Vermonter living in a paradise to a climate victim has to be one of the most disorienting things out there. 

VTDigger told us about Sequin Skye, a hospice nurse who lives - or at least lived - in an apartment building on Great Brook in Plainfield. 

The flooding covered her floor in silt. She didn't know which belongings she'd be able to save. A porch she loved sitting out on was in ruins. It was a piece of paradise before Wednesday night.

"I swear to you, it was like a babbling brook. And I sat and drank coffee yesterday on my little porch, listening to the brook and being so happy."  Now, everything was covered with dirt and mud, and it now "looks like some kind of desert."

The joy Skye experienced before the flood is shared by most Vermonters. For me, there's nothing better than sitting in this deep tub we put out on our lower deck. I fill it with cool water. On muggy evenings, I just sit there, watching the flowers bloom, absorb the deep, deep green of a Vermont summer, and wonder what all the birds are gossiping about. 

It's a moment of calm and respite for my chaotic brain.  But now, other thoughts intrude on the peace.

 I wonder, when will the other shoe drop? When will climate change directly intrude into this placid life?  

Of course, it already has intruded. You can't escape thinking about the plight of your neighbors who have been hit hard, nor should you. Storm warnings seem to carry more weight now. Will the next storm be the literal homewrecker? It seems you never know nowadays. 

BARRE

Speaking of homewreckers, what about the fate of communities that have been hit hard over and over again. Places like Barre.

Can a town like that survive after two big flood disasters in a year?  Plus having endured flooding last December?  I'm also not sure everyone in Barre recovered from two big floods in 2011.

Visitors flock to the picture perfect Instagram ready villages in Vermont, but the Green Mountain State is also home to a lot of working class towns. Ones with even less money to throw around than the pretty but still cash-strapped tourist destination towns.  

Like Barre.

I can't be the only thinking along these lines. Heck, even the Washington Post quoted me when I wrote last week, "I honestly don't know how Barre will recover from two devastating floods in one  year."

The city is losing housing and population from the flooding, yet other people are trapped in flood-prone houses, because they are not eligible for buyouts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a program that provided money to towns so they can buy up properties in flood prone areas. In many cases, those purchased homes are torn down and the area they once occupied becomes green space such as parks.   

Rain pours down in Montpelier, Vermont and flooding
shown just beginning on July 10, 2023. About 90
minutes after this photo was taken, virtually all
of downtown Montpelier was under water. With
all of our disasters in mind, we now get
nervous with every torrential downpour.

Barre received 62 applications for buyouts, but could only approve 20, because that's all the money that was available 

It almost seems as if Barre won't entire die from all these floods because some people have nowhere else to go. 

It's not as if Barre is full of millionaires.  VTDigger profiled one family whose Barre home was damaged three times by flooding in the past year. Each time, their basement filled up with water and pollutants. They applied for a buyout, but were denied. For now, anyway, Barre is only accepting buyouts for houses nearest the flood prone Stevens Brook. 

Everybody in Barre, whether they suffered flood damage or not, is in a bind because of these repeated climate related disasters.

Reports VTDigger: 

"Barre 'can't afford to buy houses for people not along the river,' according to (City Manager Nick Storellicastro, because property bought out with FEMA funds must become permanent green spaces. The city simply can't lose more housing space, according to Storellicastro, nor can the city's budget - already 'in dire straits' from last summer's flood - absorb any further loss of property tax revenue."

So where does that leave Kate O'Day, her husband Nick Roos and their baby daughter, the family profiled in VTDigger?

On top of not qualifying for a buyout, around last Christmas they also received notices from the city that they must elevate their house somehow, and also bring utilities up from the basement to meet fresh city codes. 

VTDigger again:

"And the couple wonders: Who's going to want to rent or buy a house in a floodway, with an unusable basement that you still pay taxes on, and all the utilities taking up square footage in the living area upstairs?"

Roos and O'Day said they would probably sell the house, accept their financial losses and start over somewhere else. 

For many others, though, there is no somewhere else. Either because people can't afford to move, or they have such deep ties to their town that they simply can't let go. 

Which now leaves our happy rural town life tinged with sadness and worry. There's an excellent YouTube flood fundraising video from Gold Shaw Farm in hard-hit Peacham where the narrator describes how the flood physically and emotionally affected the close-knit town. 

What made Peacham especially tragic is that the flood claimed the life of Peacham resident Dylan Kempton, 33, a married father of young children and a man that everybody in town knew and loved. 

All these climate change disasters in Vermont make me think of another song, "Our Town," by the wonderful Iris Dement. It's about a woman who lived her entire life in one small town, and now the town has died, and she has to move away. Somewhere.

The vast majority of us in Vermont are not at that point yet.  But it makes me wonder if we will see a few of our towns die away.  

It would be such a shame to lose places like Peacham, Plainfield, Barre.   People in those communities are banding together, and Vermonters are pretty awesome at finding creative solutions to some of our deepest problems. 

But some of us might well have to abandon our dreams of living out our days in our small towns, driven out by climate change. I guess Vermont is one microcosm of what's going on everywhere else in the world. 

Those lyrics from Dement's "Our Town" haunt me, given what we've been through with climate disasters in recent years:

"And you know the sun's settin' fast

And just like they say nothing good ever lasts.

Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,

 But hold on to your lover 

'Cause your heart's bound to die.

Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.

Can't you see the sun's settin' fast down on our town, on our town

Goodnight."

 

 

Hot Times In The Arctic: Annual Report Card Shows Big Changes Affecting Entire World

The Arctic got at best a D- in NOAA's annual Arctic report
card that takes a look at how climate change is affecting
the top of the world. Remember, what goes on in the
Arctic does not stay in the Arctic .

 Most of the world has had a really hot year in this age of climate change. 

Relatively speaking, the Arctic was arguably the most out of whack, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual Arctic Report Card, which was released Tuesday. 

The main takeaway from this year's edition: The Arctic is warming almost four times faster than the world as a whole, and had their hottest summer since at least 1900,

According to NPR:

"'The Arctic is now more relevant to us that it has ever been before,' said NOAA administrator Rick Spinrad. 'In many cases, what we're seeing is - by a few years - the kinds of impacts that we're going to see elsewhere in the country.'

Climate change in the Arctic doesn't just offer a view of the future. It also directly influences worldwide changes across ecosystems, from sea-level rise, to new weather patterns to altered wildlife migrations. 

As Spinrad put it,' what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic."

The report has plenty of examples of how warming in the Arctic is screwing with people who live near the upper reaches of the Earth, and everybody elsewhere. 

The Arctic had its hottest summer on record and its sixth warmest year on record. Despite the summer heat, the Arctic "only" had its sixth lowest sea ice extent on record.  That was because some pockets of the Arctic were relatively cool, like the East Siberian Sea and areas of ice near Alaska. That slowed the ice melt in the summer a little. 

Greenland lost 150 billion tons of ice. That's bad because Greenland is the second biggest source of global sea level rise. One mitigating factor became apparent this year. A warmer Arctic means a wetter Arctic. At least most of the time. That means it snowed more than usual in Greenland this year. The extra snow ensured that the loss of Greenland ice was less than the recent average. 

It's worth noting that the peak high point of Greenland's ice sheet, 10,000 feet above sea level, got above freezing this summer for only the fifth time on record. 

Worldwide commerce is being affected by a warming Arctic, or better or worse. As the Washington Post tells us:

"The Northwest Passage, which allows ships to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific archipelago, was relatively ice free by late August....The Northwest Passage has long been an object of fascination as a means to dramatically reduce shipping distances and costs, and especially since 2007, when dramatic melting first opened it up."

Shipping companies are really taking notice of this. Early in my lifetime, it was quite a laughable idea that the Northwest Passage would be a viable shipping route. How times change with climate change. 

Wildfires, of all things, are becoming increasingly common in the Arctic.  As I've already reported, most of Canada was seemingly on fire during 2023. That includes the far north of that nation.

Sure, as noted, the Arctic is by and large getting wetter, but the droughts in between the rains are also getting worse. 

Per the Washington Post: 

"More than 90 percent of the 11 million acres that burned across Canada through the end of October was in the Northwest Territories, according to the report. Data from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service released Tuesday showed that Canada accounted for 23 percent of global wildfire carbon emissions this year."

Climate change is making Arctic salmon populations weird. That's important because that's the livelihood of many people in the Arctic. 

Says NPR: 

It'll be interesting, and probably alarming to see what happens in the next 12 months up in the Arctic. El Nino is helping to supercharge climate change, at least temporarily. 

Though I'm sure there will be record warmth up there this winter, it won't matter too much quite yet because it will still be too cold for appreciable warming.

But a warm winter would make less ice for than normal, setting the stage for even lower sea ice extent next summer. Greenland remains a wildcard. I wonder if huge heat waves - at least by their standards - will cause even greater ice loss than in recent years. 

Remember the quote cited above: What goes on the Arctic doesn't stay in the Arctic. It's part of the reason we in Vermont choked on wildfire smoke last summer. Gawd knows what a hot Arctic will bring us next year. 

An Especially Painful Loss: Historic California Gold Rush Town Succumbs To Wildfire

A historic hotel in Greenville, California before a wildfire

destroyed the old Wild West community

It's a scenario that has become so painfully common in California and elsewhere in recent years.

A massive wildfire roars into a town, destroying blocks of homes, businesses, and other buildings. Lives are lost. Livelihoods are lost. All sense of security is lost. It's the new normal, but nothing about it feels normal. 

Paradise was lost, literally, when that town of 27,000 mostly burned down in 2018 in the Camp Fire. People are returning and rebuilding in that town, but it still faces an uncertain future. Especially since there's nothing preventing another huge fire from bearing down on the town from the surrounding mountains. 

A big chunk of Santa Rosa, California succumbed to flames in 2017 as a wildfire roared deep into the city of 179,000 people. It put a lie to the notion that you're safe from wildfires if you live away from the forest.

The wildfires keep coming, faster and more furiously. Several hamlets in Oregon were wiped out in a day last year. 

Earlier this summer, the tiny town of Lytton, British Columbia, Canada set the record for the hottest temperature on record for that entire nation. The next day, a wildfire roared into that baked community, demolishing it. The outskirts of Athens and parts of coastal Turkey this past week. 

One of the latest towns to disappear in a climate-related wildfire was the small hamlet of Greenville.   The so-called Dixie Fire laid waste to Greenville earlier this month. Compared to those larger communities decimated by fires recently, Greenville seems like small potatoes.  It had a population of only between 800 and 900 people. 

What made the loss of Greenville painful is its small downtown was a historic snapshot of what things looked like in Gold Rush era California. Before the fire, you can look at downtown Greenville, or photos of it, and in your minds eye see the Gold Rush wild west come alive. 

Wildfire has replaced Wild West.  Modern day Greenville was small enough so that most everybody knew each other. Some residents had been there for generations. Others fled the rush of the Bay Area or the Los Angeles basin to find peace in the mountains. 

Greenville was a quirky, remote mountain town, which made it a treasure. Descriptions of Greenville made me think of some unique, offbeat mountain towns here in Vermont, like Montgomery or Shrewsbury or Island Pond.  

Same hotel as above after the Dixie Fire roared 

through Greenville, California.

Nobody could capture what the loss Greenville suffered was like more than Meg Upton, who just wrote "Eulogy For Greenville" in Plumas News.

Imagine if we lost something like Montgomery or Shrewsbury to a wildfire. This is how Upton described her  "defiantly quirky beautiful adopted hometown." before the fire:

"We were an island of misfit toys and we liked it like that. Everywhere in the country there are people not getting along anymore because of different political perspectives, but in Greenville there flat out wasn't enough of us to take sides. You had to have each other's backs anyhow whether you agreed with someone or not."

Then the fire roared through.

"And now the bulk of it is gone. Some of us will have the stamina to rebuild and some of us will not. Some have insurance. Some do not. Our historic buildings are gone. Our newer ones are gone too. To live in Greenville was to live history. You couldn't escape history. Generations of families grew up here and came back again and again."

I don't know how much climate change had to do with the destruction of Greenville, but it almost surely played a part.  The region is enduring a historic drought. It's hotter and drier and scarier in California than it's probably been in centuries.  The fire that roared through Greenville is California's biggest fire on record, replacing a fire last year that had reached that grim milestone.

This  Dixie Fire is still burning.   Favorable weather conditions have since quieted that fire down in the days after it roared through Greenville. But it's a monster that is ready to wake up again and devour more towns, if other wildfires don't beat it to the punch first. 

There's always been wildfires in California. Now, though, they seem to be bigger, weirder, way more erratic, way more fierce, way more cataclysmic.

As I began writing this a couple week ago  out on my deck on a Vermont warm August evening, the air is thick with haze. Most of the haze consist of wildfire smoke, from the big fires in the western United States, or western or central Canada.

I don't know whether any of the smoke from the destruction of Greenville has reached us or whether the ashes fell somewhere else.  . But I suspect a tiny part of the frequent haze and smoke attacks we've seen in Vermont this summer might end up being the sooty remains of Greenville, California. 

All the haze and smoke we've seen in Vermont this summer isn't a big deal, compared to the destruction wrought by those western U.S. and Canadian forest fires.  But it still makes me sad. 

And a little worried. Sometimes more than a little worried. Climate change affects us all. 

Sometimes, it's an inconvenience. Sometimes it's an incredibly bitter loss. Greenville was one of those bitter losses. The saddest part is the pace of those bitter losses is increasing. And you never know who's next 

 

 

That's not to say Greenville can't come back in some fashion.  It was mostly destroyed in an 1881 wildfire and then quickly rebuilt