Storm's path is rare
Milton is fueled by unusually warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, where one National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration-tracked
buoy near the storm's projected path Saturday night recorded a water temperature of nearly 86 degrees, 2 degrees warmer than the air. The storm is already being noted for rare attributes during a busy Atlantic hurricane season.
It will be the fifth hurricane to make landfall on the U.S. mainland in 2024, tying 2004, 2005, and 1893 for the most hurricanes to make mainland landfall on record.
And it's a rarified product of its development in the Bay of Campeche, a sheltered southern bite in the Gulf of Mexico west of the Yucatán Peninsula. Since 1850, only two storms that originated there have struck Florida; none have done it in the past 155 years, with the last to take that path recorded in 1867.
Milton is the sixth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, which now has recorded the most such storms between Sept. 24 and Oct. 5, according to Colorado State University meteorologist
Philip Klotzbach.
The last time three named storms (including Kirk and Leslie) were spinning in
the Atlantic in October was 2018, he said.
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