islandgirl45 wrote:Zooming in on the NHC's interactive map, it looks like the East Coast exit point on the current track is around south Cocoa Beach. That's about 70 miles south of my home town. I'm trying to figure what kind of wind speeds I should expect that far away from the center, given the forecast intensity and track?
If you're on the northside of this system as it's cutting across the state, prepare for some nasty gusts. See my posts here and here on why we expect the wind field to expand. The NHC took note of this as well on the 5PM discussion:
Later on, vertical wind shear is
forecast to markedly increase as Milton approaches Florida, and
some weakening is anticipated. However, the regional hurricane
models are showing the system growing even if it weakens, and we are
expecting Milton to be a large hurricane at landfall, with very
dangerous impacts spread out over a big area.
We don't have to go very far back to see a recent example, where Helene had gusts well into Georgia that were ~100 mph (as it also transitioned to extratropical). In fact, we even had a gust of 68 mph all the way up in Indianapolis from Helene! I would expect we would see gusts exceeding 100mph far inland with Milton given the current intensity guidance, in particular on the north side. Do not mess around with this storm, even further inland.