A south Florida meteorologist got emotional as he described the severity of Hurricane Milton, a Category 5 storm raging through the Gulf of Mexico on Monday that is expected to make landfall in the U.S. this week.
“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible Hurricane,” said John Morales, a certified consulting meteorologist and hurricane specialist for NBC6 in Miami.
Morales’s voice cracked as he described the storm rapidly gaining in intensity, noting the hurricane’s pressure has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.
“I apologize,” he said on the station’s air, “but this is just horrific.”
Milton has maximum sustained winds of 160 miles per hour and is currently passing through the Gulf of Mexico, where the seas are “so incredibly hot,” Morales reported.
“You know what’s driving that, I don’t have to tell you … global warming, climate change leading to this and becoming an increasing threat,” he continued, noting many of the people in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, which will be in the path of the storm, “have just the very basics.”
Milton’s impending landfall in Florida comes just days after Hurricane Helene ravaged several states in the Southeastern U.S. and led to widespread devastation across western North Carolina.