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    • Hurricane Helene makes landfall on Apalachee Bay, Florida. Alerts: live updates
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    Hurricane Helene makes landfall on Apalachee Bay, Florida. Alerts: live updates

    Vaseline Posted on

    Ryan Truchelut
    | WeatherTiger

    Hurricane Helene is expected to become a destructive Category 3 hurricane as it approaches the Tallahassee area and Florida’s Big Bend. Landfall is expected late Thursday.

    Helene brings dangers of life-threatening storm surges, destructive winds and flash flooding along the entire west coast of Florida and the Big Bend, the NHC reported. The highest flood levels and potentially catastrophic hurricane-force winds are expected along the Big Bend coast.

    Dr. Ryan Truchelut of Tallahassee-based WeatherTiger follows Helene to landfall on the coast of Florida’s Big Bend and offers this running analysis of what to expect leading up to landfall.

    Here’s the latest.

    Update #4

    In addition to the wind and wave threats, life-threatening flooding is occurring and forecast in Florida and the southeastern US. The next post will look at where it will happen this afternoon, but let’s start with the broadest perspective of where warnings and warnings stand. indicative of threats and impacts to precipitation are in effect. As with the wind advisories in the previous post, it’s a huge swath of the Southeastern United States that is under Flood Watch this afternoon: the areas in the dark green of Florida (with the exception of Pensacola, which I’m starting to hate, sorry Pensacola) extends north to Virginia, and west to Arkansas and southeastern Missouri. Significant flood and flash flood warning areas are built into the watches in bright green and dark red respectively. A Major Flash Flood Warning is currently in effect in Florida’s Apalachicola River Valley, where excessive, heavy rain has been falling since last night. Given the heavy rains to come and the saturated soils in many of these areas, NOAA has highlighted a region from the central part of the country. Panhandle to western North Carolina as the risk of flash flooding is highest, including the Tallahassee region where landfall is expected tonight.

    “High risk” events are quite rare and responsible for a large proportion of recorded flood damage. So take the flood threat seriously by not driving in flood waters of any depth and evacuating if local emergency services have been notified. Finally, much of Florida, eastern Georgia, and South Carolina are currently under Tornado Watch, as Helene’s bands are capable of quickly generating damaging tornadoes many hundreds of miles away from the center. And indeed, I saw several Tornado Warnings cross my desk this afternoon for locations in the Eastern Panhandle. Have a means on hand to receive Tornado Warnings if you are under surveillance.

    The NHC issued the interim advice of 2 p.m. a few minutes earlier, which is normal. (We call this an ‘interim’ advisory because, unlike the full advisory packages typically issued at 5am and 11am and 5pm and 11pm, there is no updated track and intensity forecast with these NHC products. They are every 3 hours halfway between the 5s and 11s (the 2s and 8s) to update the intensity, positions and alerts.

    The takeaway here from the 2 p.m. advisory is that Helene’s estimated sustained wind speeds have increased another 5 mph to about 110 mph, or just below Category 3 status on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which, as I’ve pointed out this week, isn’t really the right scale on which to judge Helene because of her sheer size. The pressure as measured by NOAA Hurricane Hunters continues to drop steadily and is now below 960 millibars. The bottom line is that Helene is getting stronger as expected.

    Helene is a four-quadrant tropical threat, causing widespread and significant impacts from storm surges, winds, rain, and tornadoes. I’ll cover each of these threats individually over the next few hours, but let’s start by reviewing the National Weather Service watches and warnings in effect for each impact, starting with wind and wave action.

    For winds, the NHC’s new “experimental” cone is a nice visual summary of the incredible size of Helene’s wind field, and the threat the hurricane poses to a huge swath of the southeastern US. A hurricane warning is in effect for central and eastern Florida Panhandle, Big Bend and the northern Nature Coast, as well as the southwestern quarter of Georgia and a sliver of southeastern Alabama. A tropical storm warning is in effect for the rest of Florida, except for the lucky ducks in Destin and Pensacola, the rest of Georgia, all of South Carolina, part of western North Carolina and a little more of eastern Alabama. This is due to Helene’s strength, size and likely forward speed of over 40 km/h at landfall. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a larger area of ​​tropical wind warnings at once.

    All that wind is pushing a wall of water through the eastern Gulf into Apalachee Bay, and storm surge warnings are in effect from Cape San Blas to Everglades National Park. If you have received a warning and evacuation order, hopefully you have already prepared it. If not, you still have a few hours to do this safely. That wall of water is coming, and you need to be inland enough not to be in it tonight. There is already a significant increase happening in west-central and southwest Florida, as I will show in a future post.

    If you’ve never read my forecasts for today, I’m Ryan Truchelut, chief meteorologist at WeatherTiger, a weather consulting and forecasting company based in Tallahassee, and I’ve been preparing for days like these my whole life.

    ➤ Weather warnings via SMS: Sign up to receive updates on current storms and weather conditions by location

    I’ve been in trouble in all of Florida’s worst hurricanes in the last decade: Irma, Michael, Dorian, Ian, Idalia. I have been researching hurricanes for over 15 years and am a graduate of FSU’s doctoral meteorology program. I have been through the eye of Hurricane Charley. However, I have never been through the eyes of a Category 3+ hurricane in Tallahassee, as the last time that happened was (probably) 1842.

    Over the next ten hours, I will update this page regularly with minute-by-minute meteorological developments: the latest NHC advisories, warnings from the National Weather Service, local observations from across Florida, and forecast insights on all aspects of this catastrophic situation. storm.

    My goal is to keep you safe by providing accurate, no-hype, real-time information until Helene moves from Florida, or, realistically, until the bits, bytes, and electrons stop flowing here at WeatherTiger World’s Southeast headquarters Tallahassee. My home is 20 miles from the Gulf on high ground, so while I am confident in my physical safety, I am not confident that my communication problems will last all night. It all depends on where Helene’s core goes and how strong it is. I will post until I can post no more, which is really all any of us can do.

    If you’re just catching up on Hurricane Helene, it was busy this morning. According to the NHC advisory at 11 a.m., Helene has strengthened to a Category 2 hurricane, with maximum sustained winds estimated at 110 miles per hour. This hurricane continues to intensify this afternoon as it accelerates north-northeast toward Apalachee Bay. The eyewall will likely reach the Big Bend coastline around 8 p.m., with downtown Helene likely crossing the central coast of Apalachee Bay before midnight.

    Helene is a massive hurricane, with tropical storm force winds extending nearly 350 miles (560 kilometers) southeast of the center. These winds are currently spreading across much of South and Central Florida, and tropical storm and coastal storm surge warnings are in effect. For North Florida and west-central Florida, where storm surge and hurricane warnings are in effect, the weather will turn downhill this afternoon and truly life-threatening conditions will arrive in the evening hours. By late afternoon you should be sheltering in place on the Nature Coast, in the Big Bend and the eastern Panhandle.

    Folks, we are in a historically tight spot, facing the most formidable hurricane threat to the Big Bend in some 180 years, a storm that dwarfs last year’s Idalia in size and impact. I feel the same fear, anxiety and fear as many of you. My job is to try to make this terrible experience a little less miserable and traumatic by telling you clearly and unfiltered what will happen and when with Helene.

    Let’s get through this together. We’ll be back in about twenty minutes to navigate the current circumstances and future threats.”

    (This story has been updated to add new information.)

    Dr. Ryan Truchelut is chief meteorologist at WeatherTiger, a Tallahassee-based company that provides forensic meteorology witness services and agricultural and hurricane forecasting subscription services. Visit weretiger.com for more information. Email Truchelut at [email protected].

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