MANASOTA KEY, Fla. — For the last week since Hurricane Milton, the national weather service has sent teams across Florida to survey the damage and record valuable data. On Thursday, Fox 4 Meteorologist got join one of the teams in Charlotte County. And they tell him that this data isn’t just about an accurate record book.
“To make our modeling better,” said Jennifer Hubbard, Warning Coordination Meteorologist with National Weather Service Tampa Bay. “People who do manufacturing, allow them to get better, so that have a more resilient community in the future, and we can withstand storms better in the future.”
Hubbard and her colleague Christianne first took Shipley to Manasota Key where they toured the damage near Stump Pass. Among the damage, homes were completely removed from their foundation pushed into the roads. But what they were looking for is the high-water marks from Milton’s surge.
“We to get an accurate representation, an accurate measurement of how high that water got,” said Hubbard. “We use the high-water marks made by seeds and debris in the water.”
That high water mark represents just how high the storm surge got during Milton, excluding the waves on top of the surge. For Manasota Key, they measured between 71 and 73 inches of surge or about 6 feet near stump pass.
Following several surge measurements around Manasota, they headed inland to El Jobean, the site of a suspected tornado. In fact, this tornado damage was first siting by Fox 4’s Storm Fox Team the morning after Milton made landfall. Damage that Shipley later called into the National Weather Service for them to survey. But unlike surveying for storm surge, tornado survey is a bit more of scavenger hunt.
“You can kind of have to hunt it down, go road by road, see where that higher level of damage is and document that,” said Hubbard. “And keep going until you can’t find any more points beyond that mark. That is typically where the tornado would have lifted. Same as where touched. You go to the opposite direction until don’t see any more of high damage indicators.”
For this neighborhood off Armada Road, the worst damage focused around a mobile home with the roof ripped off. And while NWS has confirmed this to be tornado damage it will still be a day or two before we get the official EF scale rating based off estimated wind speeds and the damage that it inflicted.
But this wasn’t the only tornado during Milton. The state saw the worst tornado outbreak since 1950, with more than 120 warnings issued with at least 30 confirmed tornadoes so far.
