The world’s oceans in recent months have shattered temperature records, with multiple bodies of water, including the North Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Basin“We’ve seen this movie a lot,” he said. “We saw this with Hurricane Ian last year, though it did weaken a little bit right before landfall. We saw this with Hurricane Ida the year before that in Louisiana. We saw it with Laura. We saw it with Harvey. So a lot of rapid intensifiers right before landfall.
“These storms are intensifying so fast that our local emergency management officials have less time to warn and evacuate and get people to safety,” Criswell said. Jill Trepanier, an associate professor and climate scientist at Louisiana State University, said Idalia’s escalation into a Category 4 hurricane was “impressive” and exactly what forecasters were predicting as the storm moved through the warm waters of the eastern Gulf.Idalia also traveled through a pocket of low wind shear, which describes the change in speed and direction of winds at different atmospheric heights.
Though Idalia weakened into a Category 3 hurricane before making landfall, destruction along the coast is still expected to be severe. Masters noted that Idalia is now one of 10 storms since 1950 that intensified at least 40 mph in the 24 hours before making landfall in the United States.