way the a stop. then all of the sudden you got all the tree roots in water. hmm. what s going to happen if you blow an 80 miles per hour wind over tree roots in water. those trees are going to come down. then you take 4 feet, 12 feet, and all of the sudden you are miles and miles inland before you actually get that saltwater to stop. and then you ve got water on roadways, low spots that aren t going to drain, and it s going to be very difficult for people to get out of there tomorrow. that s why the governor said you have to go tonight. you can understand, you drive in here. it s flat for miles and miles and miles. nothing to stop that water if it comes in from the gulf there. chad myers, thank you so much. please keep us posted. all that new data that chad was just going over, a lot of it is coming from these hurricane hunter aircraft that are flying in and out multiple times of hurricane idalia. right before we came to air, we
cut off from the mainland by a storm surge of some 8 to 12 feet. tampa bay also bracing as much as 4 to 6 feet of storm surge, anticipated there. and it isn t only florida. georgia and the carolinas also under a state of emergency amid fears that that could trigger flash floods and tornados. let s begin this hour with chad myers who s in the cnn weather center. as we look at this swiftly intensifying storm, what is the latest here? the hurricane hunter aircraft are flying through the storm right now, and they found an alarming number. 966 millibars, that s down significantly from the last time they flew through the storm, which means the storm is intensifying. the lower the pressure, the higher the wind speeds. sometimes it takes a while for the wind speeds to catch up. but when you start to lower the pressure, you intensify the storm, 100 miles per hour right now. i expect that number is going to keep rolling up all night long.
hundred miles before it hits land. it could get stronger than that in between what we call these points where you see all the circles there on the cone. hurricane warnings in tampa all the way up to apalachicola. my concern is this map looks an awful lot like what ian looked like just about 36 hours before arrival. ian missed tampa and ended up way down here at ft. myers beach. i don t want you to take this lightly, tampa, because the track is up here this time, not towards you. if it takes that typical right-hand turn, you are right in the middle of what could be a catastrophic hurricane. the area it s going to hit is called the big bend area until any models change. they haven t changed today. right now we re at a 70-mile-per-hour storm. another hurricane hunter aircraft is on its way to check to see if that went down or up over the past couple of hours. there s that category 3 to the west of about new port richey,
let s bring in cnn s chad myers to talk about this. chad, it s kind of strange to talk about a hurricane of this magnitude heading towards southern california. how bad could it be? this will be a once in a generation or maybe longer type of storm. this will do infrastructure damage. this will wash out roadways. it may take out bridges and put an awful lot of water in places where people live. this just isn t a desert system. so 130-mile-per-hour storm. the latest advisory, the 11:00 advisory just out. the hurricane hunter aircraft is on the way to make sure, to check it out. also what was a tropical storm watch a few hours ago has now turned into a tropical storm warning for southern california from point mugu all the way south, even south of san diego. to the south of there, hurricane warnings because they re going to get hurricane conditions. i don t think we re going to see hurricane conditions in california, but it s going to be pretty close, especially on top of some of these mo
on hurricane hilary. our meteorologist chad myers is in the cnn weather center. chd, when will the storm reach the u.s., and what can we expect once it s here? i think the rain probably starts tomorrow afternoon, and we hope that s the case. and i ll tell you why. because we hope the ground is wet before the wind blows 60. because if the wind is blowing 60 in a desert in a place that hasn t seen a lot of rain this summer at all, you could see fires before the hurricane ends and comes to put these fires out, so these are called prec precursor rains. they come in before the hurricane. 2:00 advisory 145 miles per hour. the hurricane hunter aircraft just flew through this. it left biloxi and a prop c130 flew all the way up to the storm but it found the pressure was not as low, and it found the winds were not as high as the