As Hurricane Milton neared Florida’s west coast on Wednesday, southeast Florida felt mostly removed from the pending destruction. But the region was caught off guard by a historic outbreak of powerful tornadoes.
Crucially, Milton’s track put South Florida in the most deadly quadrant of the storm. As a result, it spawning at least 47 tornado reports across Florida, from Fort Myers to Homestead, Palm Beach County and north to Martin and St. Lucie counties, where one twister killed multiple people.
The tornadoes ripped across highways, wildlife refuges and suburbia, tossing cars and trapping people inside. They uprooted trees and toppled toolsheds.
All told, the National Weather Service issued 126 tornado warnings. “We’ve already seen probably more tornado watches than I’ve ever seen,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis at a news conference. “No one remembers ever seeing this many tornado warnings.”
In fact, the 55 warnings that the Miami office of the National Weather Service issued is the most they’ve ever put out in one day. But why? How could a hurricane 300 miles away, and still at sea, cause havoc on the east coast before anyone on the west coast saw damage.
It’s all in the angle
Any hurricane can produce tornadoes, you just don’t know if it’s going to be one — or 47. Hurricane Helene was a huge, but tornadoes were minimal.
National Weather Service meteorologist Luke Culver said it’s all about the track that put South Florida in the lower right-hand quadrant of the storm.
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“With hurricanes that move over the Gulf and into Central Florida, we’re in the bottom right sector of the hurricane, and that’s generally where the most tornadoes occur,” he said.
As Milton moved across the Gulf, it cut to the northeast. “That turn put us in that perfect quadrant (for tornadoes),” Culver said. “It has a maximized corridor of shear, which is what causes the thunderstorms to spin and cause tornadoes.”
Erik Salna, of Florida International University’s Extreme Events Institute, agrees. “Milton was coming in from the west. That puts us in the lower right-hand quadrant of the storm — the most violent and unstable area.”
“The fact that we got tornadoes is not surprising,” he said, “but their strength was.”
Florida has the fourth most tornadoes of any state, said Salna, but they tend to be small and don’t last long. “What we saw yesterday, those are something you’d see in the Midwest. … Milton was creating these stronger isolated thunderstorms producing stronger tornadoes. That’s not typical.”
These supercell thunderstorms that hatched the tornadoes had an unusually long track for Florida, and were “low-top,” meaning they did not tower into the sky like the classic thunderheads of summer. “But they’re still rotating thunderstorms, which produce tornadoes” Culver said.
The mechanics of a tornado come from wind shear — air at different altitudes moving in different directions. Salna, who lives in Broward County, said he saw clouds at a low level moving crosswise to clouds at higher levels. That’s a sign of shear, he said. “When you add the warm rising air of a thunderstorm, you get a potential tornado.”
That’s what happened on Wednesday.
Both Culver and Salna see parallels to 2022’s Hurricane Ian, which triggered 47 warnings from the South Florida office of the weather service — their second most ever.
Hurricanes Ian and Milton had a similar track that put South Florida in the violent lower right-hand quadrant. Ian also produced a strong EF2 twisters with 111–135 mph winds, including the Kings Point tornado near Delray Beach — about 10 miles east of a strong Milton tornado that ripped north through Wellington and on to Jupiter.
“Overall, we only issued a few more tornado warnings (for Milton) than we did with Ian, so it really is a great comparison,” Culver said.
On Wednesday, National Weather Service crews spread out across South Florida to study the destruction. The teams have a catalog of damage indicators that correlate with wind speed — a bent flagpole or an upturned car would indicate a certain wind speed. Their findings will go into data to help understand more about what happened.
But there still much that’s unknown about this historic outbreak of climate violence.
“I think an event like this will be studied,” Salna said. “Scientists will look at it and say, what was so different about our atmosphere?”
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