When Hurricane Milton exploded from a Category 1 storm to a Category 5 storm over the course of 12 hours yesterday, climate scientists and meteorologists were stunned. NBC6’s John Morales, a veteran TV meteorologist in South Florida, choked up as he described how quickly and dramatically the storm had grown. For most people, a 50 millibar pressure drop means nothing; a weatherman understands, as Morales said midway through the broadcast, that “this is just horrific.” Florida is still cleaning up Helene; this storm spins much faster and is more compact and organized.

In a sense, Milton is exactly the kind of storm that scientists have warned could happen; Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, called it shocking but not surprising. “One of the things we know is that in a warmer world the most intense storms are more intense,” he told me. Milton may have been a significant hurricane anyway, but every aspect of the storm that could have been evoked was.

A hurricane is created from multiple variables, and in Milton the variables have come together to form a nightmare. The storm is gaining significant energy due to high sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, which is much hotter than normal. And that energy translates into higher wind speeds. Milton also absorbs moisture from the very humid atmosphere, which can generally hold 7 percent more water vapor for every degree Celsius increase in temperature. In addition, the air is very unstable and can therefore rise more easily, allowing the hurricane to form and maintain its shape. And thanks to La Niña, there isn’t much wind shear — the speed and direction of the wind are fairly uniform at different altitudes — “so the storm can stay nice and vertically stacked,” Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona, told it me. “All this together makes the storm more efficient in using the available energy.” In other words, the storm very efficiently became a major hazard.

That perfect combination — of hot seas, moist air and little wind shear — is helped by Milton’s path through the western Gulf of Mexico, which hasn’t seen much major storm activity yet this season. When a storm passes over hot water, it sucks in much of that heat, uses it as fuel and lowers the water temperature. But in the western gulf, “there was nothing else to cool the water,” Wood told me.

Milton is also a very compact storm with a very symmetrical, round core, Wood said. In contrast, Helene’s core took longer to coalesce, and the storm remained more widespread. Wind speeds in Milton increased by about 90 miles per hour in one day, intensifying faster than any other recorded storm aside from Hurricanes Wilma in 2005 and Felix in 2007. Climate scientists have been concerned for some time that climate change is causing storms could cause them to intensify more quickly and reach higher peak intensities, given an additional boost from climate change. Milton does just that.

Rapid intensification has become increasingly common in recent years. Hurricane Otis, which made landfall last year as a Category 5 near Acapulco, Mexico, has strengthened within a day of becoming a tropical storm, confusing forecasters and giving residents very little time to prepare prepare for a direct hit of that magnitude. Hurricane Idalia, also in 2023, was another example of rapid intensification, as was 2022’s Hurricane Ian. Kerry Emanuel, a meteorologist and professor emeritus at MIT, predicted less than a decade ago that the rapid intensification of hurricanes just before landfall would likely become “increasingly frequent and intense as the Earth warms,” and in the past few years that prediction has come true. is evident from additional modeling studies. It’s a new addition to the canon of climate change knowledge, so it’s not yet firmly established, but this early research points toward a link between rising temperatures and the rapid escalation of these storms. Climate change could reduce the overall number of tropical storms and hurricanes (although the mechanism causing the decline is still debated), but the storms that do form are likely to be more intense, said Tom Knutson, a senior scientist at the New York University. The National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. His recent research shows that more Category 4 and 5 storms could make landfall in the US by the end of this century. Even if we get fewer storms, they will be worse.

Trying to weather storms of that magnitude can be deadly. Overnight, Milton was relegated to Category 4, but grew in size. It could also still reintensify to Category 5. Florida is now preparing to evacuate potentially more than 6 million people ahead of Milton’s predicted landfall. And the conditions it will encounter on land have already been worsened by climate change. According to an analysis of The Washingtonpostand the sea along the coast of Tampa Bay is now nearly six inches higher than it was fourteen years ago. So when the storm surge washes over the coast, the salt water will likely travel further inland, and probably with more force, than it would otherwise.

Milton also looks like a “very wet” storm, said Gabriel A. Vecchi, a professor of climate science at Princeton University, and Florida is already soaking wet. The state has been inundated with rain, and more will precede the storm. The soil is already saturated and therefore cannot act as a sponge; normally it would serve as a partial buffer against flooding.

Precipitation is one of the best-understood areas of “attribution science,” the discipline that models how much worse climate change has likely made a given weather scenario. And climate change is clearly making hurricane rains worse. Wehner and two colleagues at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory released a preliminary analysis showing that climate change may have caused up to 50 percent more precipitation in some places in Georgia and the Carolinas during Hurricane Helene. “Instead of 10 inches, in some places they got 15. Instead of 20 inches, they got 30,” Wehner told me.

Only after Milton dies will scientists try to account for the ways in which climate change has made it more horrific than it otherwise would have been — still a big storm, perhaps, but not so intense and so fast that it gave an experienced meteorologist a cold . And the world is expected to continue to warm dramatically over the next century; storms like Milton are a preview of the types that will become more common, Vecchi told me. “We have a hard time dealing with such wet storms,” he said. “How do we deal with storms that are wetter?” These too will undoubtedly be shocking. But they shouldn’t be a surprise: we knew they were coming all along.