An interactive tracker charts the current and future path of Hurricane Milton as the deadly storm moves through the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida.
The tracker now shows Milton rising just north of the coastal port city of Campeche in Mexico as it gains strength on its northeastern trajectory toward Florida’s northwest coast.
Milton is currently producing between 2 and 3 inches of precipitation per hour near the eye of the storm, gaining momentum and moving toward Tampa, where it is expected to make landfall Wednesday morning.
Forecasters anticipate life-threatening nine-foot-high storm surge and winds of up to 150 miles per hour (mph) when the once-rare Category 5 crashes into Florida.
Up to six million residents of the state and nearby regions are under a hurricane watch, and many have been ordered to evacuate, even as commercial air travel hubs like Tampa International Airport plan early closures ahead of the storm.
Ventusky’s tracker, below, is actively synthesizing weather data to plot and predict Hurricane Milton’s path of destruction now.
Ventusky data scientists and representatives explained that the Hurricane Milton forecast was “unusual” because it was occurring almost parallel to the impact of Hurricane Kirk’s storm front as it hit southwestern France.
‘In just 24 hours, Hurricane Milton intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane,’ the weather data company posted to your account from X.com.
“Its formation is clearly visible on the satellite at night, with a clear eye rapidly forming in the center,” the company noted in its release of the nighttime satellite video.
Meteorologists use the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to define these storms into five categories of increasing severity.
The infamous Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, was only a Category 1 storm with wind speeds reaching between 74 and 95 mph, enough to critically breach levees that flooded the city.
As a Category 5, Milton will most closely resemble 1992’s Hurricane Andrew and 2018’s Hurricane Michael — two of the rare hurricanes that have hit the United States as Category 5s since 1900, according to the National Weather Service.
As a Category 5, Hurricane Andrew destroyed 99 percent of all mobile homes (1,167 of 1,176 homes) in the city of Homestead, Miami-Dade County, South Florida.
At least 15 direct deaths and 28 indirect deaths were attributed to Andrew during its catastrophic battering of the continent, and forecasters expected Hurricane Milton to be no less deadly.