The four most interesting weather phenomena during Hurricane Milton

Milton’s record-breaking tornado outbreak, tremendous rainfall in St. Petersburg, reverse storm surge in Tampa and stinging winds wowed forecasters.

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A woman collects debris caused by the destruction of the tornado's path in Cocoa Beach, Fla. Hurricane Milton tore a coast-to-coast path of destruction across Florida. (Giorgio Viera/AFP/Getty Images)
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Hurricane Milton, after wowing meteorologists by rapidly intensifying from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in about a day, unleashed a potent mix of severe weather hazards across Florida on Wednesday into early Thursday.

Some were expected, such as violent winds that left a trail of damage from coast to coast. Some weren’t as bad as feared, such as a storm surge that largely spared the city of Tampa. And some were surprising, such as a deadly tornado outbreak that could verify as one for the record books.

Here are four surprising or interesting things about Hurricane Milton:

1

Tornadoes arrived early and often

Hurricanes often spawn tornadoes as their spiral bands of showers and thunderstorms come ashore. Milton, however, shocked Florida on Wednesday when it produced an earlier-than-expected onslaught of unusually strong and long-lived tornadoes that flipped tractor-trailers, ripped off roofs and downed trees across a large swath of central and southern Florida. At least four people were killed as a result of tornadoes in St. Lucie County on the state’s central Atlantic coast.

While forecasters warned that tornadoes would be possible with Milton, the severity of the tornado outbreak and its arrival hours before Milton’s eye made landfall took many people by surprise. The National Weather Service issued 126 tornado warnings on Wednesday — at one point, there were 18 simultaneous tornado warnings in effect across the state — and there were 48 reports of tornadoes on the ground. Some may have traveled more than five miles; the average tornado goes for about 3.5 miles.

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