The event
Hurricane Milton began as a tropical depression in the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday 5th October. It very rapidly intensified to tropical storm status, before undergoing explosive intensification to a high category 5 between Sunday 6th and Monday 7th, as it moved southeast towards the Yucatan Peninsula (NOAA, 2024), where the central pressure fell to below 900 mbar (NHC, 2024). This was driven and sustained by the very high sea surface temperatures in the Gulf, which previous analysis has shown to have been made 400-800 times more likely by climate change (Climate Central, 2024). Milton then turned northeast, closing in on central Florida, in a path very close to both Tampa and Orlando. Its intensity decreased slightly to Category 3 by the time of landfall on the evening of the 9th, bringing high winds, extreme rainfall and storm surges of 5-10 feet (Miami NBC, 2024) to the western coast of Florida, before moving directly across the low-lying peninsula.
While still working on the impacts of hurricane Helene that hit only two weeks earlier (WWA, 2024), the authorities put over 1,000 first responders and more than 1,400 search and rescue personnel on the ground to support people in the path of Milton (FEMA, 2024). In addition, government authorities urged people to evacuate the area and provided free shuttles for people living in the predicted path of Milton, and issued a range of statements against misinformation (FEMA, 2024b). Over 7 million people live in the area with mandatory evacuation orders, though some did not or were unable to comply (Axios, 2024). The hurricane spawned dozens of tornadoes that resulted in many of the deaths (AP News, 2024). The full impacts of the hurricane will only be known in the days and weeks to come. At the time of writing, 16 people are confirmed to have lost their lives while more than three million are without electricity (Tampa Bay Times, 2024; New York Times, 2024; Independent, 2024).
Figure 1: Precipitation due to the passage of Hurricane Milton on October 9th. The study region for rainfall analysis is highlighted in red and key cities in Florida are shown in white. Data from NASA GPM IMERG.
Key Messages
- Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico and intensified in the course of only two days into a Category 5 hurricane. It followed in the wake of Hurricane Helene that made landfall less than two weeks before Milton. Both the rapid intensification and the fact that emergency personnel were still continuing with the recovery from Helene made preparations difficult. Despite this, many people in the immediate path evacuated and the losses and damages from Milton are much smaller than from Helene. However, the full extent of the compounding impacts from the hurricanes will only be known in the weeks to come.
- At the time of writing, the day after landfall, the observation-based datasets are not all updated to include the event. We can thus not reliably estimate how rare the heavy rainfall in the path of Milton was,