Hurricane Michael made landfall on Wednesday afternoon with powerful winds reaching all the way up to 155 miles per hour! The eye of the Category 4 system came ashore just southeast of Panama City Beach. At the time of landfall, the pressure dropped to incredibly low 919 millibars. That reading now ranks as the 3rd most intense hurricane making landfall in the United States, since records have been kept! Lower pressures were only observed, at landfall, during the 1935 Labor Day hurricane in the Florida Keys and Hurricane Camille in 1969.
Michael is now losing its punch while quickly lifting northeast. It will soon race across the Carolina’s while spreading plenty of rain. Elsewhere in the tropics, there’s still a lot of distant activity to mention. Leslie, the long-lived system that refuses to fizzle, has returned to hurricane strength over the east-central Atlantic. Just like Nadine (a tropical storm), Leslie remains no threat to land. A tropical wave in the Caribbean could become the next tropical depression as early as the weekend. Low pressure has yet to form along the westward moving wave but it has a “medium development chance” according to the National Hurricane Center.
Our south Florida weather focuses on a front. The frontal boundary dips into the state on Thursday with areas of rain in its wake. Notice here that our wind flow is arriving from the southwest. That’s a very hot and humid set up, for the end of the work week!
Temperatures could rise close to records on Thursday and Friday afternoons, with similar weather conditions. Expect some early day sunshine with sky conditions turning stormy into the afternoon. Several areas will likely get tropical type downpours. It’s also worth noting that wind speeds will continue coming down. That means storms will tend to be slow-movers, potentially dumping plenty of rain in favored locations. The weakening cold front will ultimately stall out, then lift back northward this weekend. As a result, no drying or cooling will reach south Florida in the foreseeable future!