The Big Story 

Hurricane Milton is set to make landfall late Wednesday or early Thursday in the Tampa, Fla., region after undergoing a rapid intensification this week that saw it become the third-fastest storm on record to reach Category 5 status, the most extreme classification on the hurricane scale. 

© AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell

Less than two weeks earlier, Hurricane Helene escalated in a similarly short time span in the Gulf of Mexico before ravaging the southeastern U.S.

The warming climate has been a large factor in these storms’ high intensity, as well as the pace of their intensification — and if temperatures continue to rise, future storms could gain strength faster than the communities in their path can prepare for them.

“There are a number of metrics by which both of these storms are either the most intense or most rapidly intensifying storm we’ve seen in this region,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles who researches the dynamics of extreme weather events. 

In Helene’s case, Swain said, that meant an unprecedented storm surge and inland amount of rainfall, much of which had its most dramatic effect on western North Carolina. In Milton’s, he noted the storm strengthened to Category 5 “almost literally overnight.”

While climate change does not appear to be increasing the overall frequency of storms, warming oceans are turbocharging their intensity, said Andra Garner, an associate professor in the department of environmental science at Rowan University.

“What we’ve seen in recent years is our ocean waters are warmer than usual, including the Gulf [of Mexico], where we’ve seen Milton really explode in intensity the last few days,” Garner told The Hill. “When we warm the planet with human-caused greenhouse gases, a lot of that excess warmth — about 90 percent of it — goes into the oceans."

Read more at TheHill.com.

Welcome to The Hill’s Energy & Environment newsletter, we’re Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk — keeping you up to speed on the policies impacting everything from oil and gas to new supply chains.

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