Hurricane Idalia is headed towards uncharted territory.
The storm, still intensifying, has reached Category 4 status (meaning winds over 130 mph) and is expected to make landfall Wednesday morning. It’s on track to hit Florida’s Big Bend region at a location no major hurricane — meaning Category 3 or higher — has ever historically landed.
“Hurricane Idalia will likely be an unprecedented event for many locations in the Florida Big Bend,” the Tallahassee National Weather Service office tweeted. “Looking back through recorded history, NO major hurricanes have ever moved through the Apalachee Bay. When you try to compare this storm to others, DON’T. No one has seen this.”
Forecasters emphasized that “there are NO major hurricanes in the historical dataset going back to 1851 that have tracked into Apalachee Bay. None. Don’t mess around with this.”
Crucially, this region is quite vulnerable to storm surge — the ocean water pushed onto shore, at times violently, by a tropical storm’s strong winds.
“The Florida Forgotten Coast and Big Bend are some of the most surge-prone areas in the world. The terrain is essentially flat inland a long way from the coast,” Clark Evans, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, noted online.
The surge will be serious. The National Hurricane Center projects 10 to 15 feet of surge in the area from Aucilla River to Yankeetown, Florida. It will be “catastrophic,” the agency underscored.
Idalia strengthened into a hurricane on Tuesday, and is expected to continue intensifying. That’s a major reason why the winds, and accompanying storm surge, are so extreme. Hurricane Idalia is benefiting from profoundly warm ocean temperatures, which fuel the storm, as well as a lack of opposing winds (wind shear) that can diminish a storm’s power.
