you re live in the cnn newsroom. hello again, everyone. thank you for joining me. i m fredricka whitfield. right now in the state of florida a state of emergency is in effect statewide, and the governor is calling up the national guard as tropical storm ian gains strength and moves closer to florida s west coast. ian is expected to intensify into a cat gather 4 had and making landfall as early as wednesday night. governor desantis is urging people to prepare now. expect heavy rains, strong winds, flash flooding, storm surge and even isolated tornadoes. make preparations now, and i know a lot of people have been doing it throughout the state of florida and the things you should be prepared with food, water, batteries, medicine, fuel. anticipate the closer you are to where the eye of the storm makes landfall, anticipate power outages. that is something that will likely happen with a hurricane of this magnitude. cnn s patrick ottoman is in havana, cuba, where warnings ar
intensification? at noaa research we are studying that this year. out with our planes every 12 hours right now studying the storm. a couple predictors, the ocean temperatures are extremely warm right now and not just at the surface. it s warm down to great depths so there s a lot of fuel to energize the storms. the winds will be favorable. you can get a storm to rapidly intensify pretty quickly and a lot of our models are suggesting we will indeed see that rapid intensification over the next couple of days. and so what about the data collection from the hurricane planes? what kind of information is being gathered? we have a lot of different things we re launching, the pair chutes to measure the atmosphere and ocean probes that look at that warm watt they re goes way down to great depths. doppler radar like we ll see on the news at night and it s