it s forecast to reach major hurricane status baring down on cuba. the storm s path otherwise uncertain, but floridians are prepare ing for the worst. people are filling sand beings to protect against the heavy rains and storm surge. long lines outside of stores as people look to stock up on supplies. you can see the empty health ises there. bottled water, wasn t of the hot est items. florida is under a state of emergency. governor ron desantis activated the national guard. joining us is michael brennan, acting deputy director for noaa. thank you so much for being with us on this morning as we re watching ian approach here. give us a sense of where you are watching and when you re expecting landfall. well, you can see ian right now is located about 90 miles southwest of grnd kay men with intense activity developing near the center. we have seen this intensify rapidly. if we look at the forecast now, we re expecting ian to turn from its northwestern motion and move towar
even the middle keys could be 2 to 3 feet. you will certainly get some very fast water flowing through the cuts there, especially in the lower and the middle keys. but where it goes from there is the size of this cone getting bigger and bigger and it is because this is the average error times a little bit. so two-thirds of the storm should fall into this cone. this is a completely different storm if this side of the cone is involved. this is a different storm for tampa if this side of the cone is involved. i think everybody is kind of looking down the middle because the computer models are trying to figure it out. the gfs, the american model, was way out west, started charging to the east. the european model is way over here, started charging to the west and now they re literally only 50 to 75 miles apart. so that kind of gives you a good runway. it also gives us a good runway if that actually occurs what the storm surge threat might be. from tampa to inglewood, bonita spring
forecasters expect ian to intensify into a major hurricane in the next 24 hours before it makes landfall somewhere along florida s west coast. ian poses a formidable storm surge threat for the tampa area. let s begin with chad myers, he has the latest hurricane center advisory. and chad, something that i found interesting here, officials were saying there is a higher than usual unpredict ability about how strong this storm will be and where it is going to land. true. and i think we re getting we re anxious. we want this to be perfect. we want all of the models to line up and say this is what is going to happen and that hasn t happened. a few models on the right and the left, not really agreeing. so an 80 mile per hour storm at the 11:00 advisory two minutes ago. the storm does move across cuba overnight and into the southwestern part of florida with winds and waves already on shore by 8:00 wednesday morning. there will already be wind. but the storm is still growing. wher
a pretty low lying area. that storm surge they re preparing for, what exactly might that look like when it comes to the businesses and the homes in that area? reporter: well, to give you a sense of howe things look where we are right now, we re at a park that s surrounded by three bays, the old tampa bay, the tampa bay and then that third bay. what they re worried about, especially the folks in pinellas county, that storm surge is going to flood things no matter what. even if that forecast track ends up having ian moving parallel to tampa bay and the tampa area, they still believe we re going to see a lot of that water making its way inland. so they want folks to go ahead and come out and get these sandbags. the lines at these three locations were pretty long. it s our understanding they re going to continue to do this today and tomorrow and most likely into wednesday. however, emergency officials again have been telling folks, try to get this done early because we could
suarez live in tampa. chad myers is tracking the storm. chad, we re talking about all of the computer models, the various paths. what are they telling us right now? they re getting more organized even though there are five or so different models that we look at. the ones that the american model was really way out in the middle of the gulf of mexico. that was last week. the european model was in the atlantic ocean, 700 miles away. now all of that has calmed down and narrowed down to about a 100 wide strip where not that much air, what a pretty picture as long as you doan have to deal with this. this is the hurricane. the visible picture from the sky. this is what it looks like when you talk about the hot towers. the big thunderstorms around what could be and likely later today an eye. the storm is now breathing. it is sucking air into it from the surface and it is blowing it up to those towers and out of the top and that is what we call a breathing, living, growing hurricane