We are back live in the cnn newsroom. Im jim acosta in washington. We are tracking hurricane hilary. The system just weakened to a category 2 storm with winds of 110 miles per hour. The historic and potentially catastrophic storm is barrelling toward the southwestern United States, triggering the first ever Tropical Storm warning for millions of people in Southern California. The San Bernardino county Sheriffs Department just issued an Evacuation Warning for some areas in that part of Southern California. Thats just east of los angeles in the mountain and foothill areas. Hilary could bring a years worth of rain in a single day to parts of california, arizona, and nevada. Lets go straight to the cnn weather center, Meteorologist Derek Van Dam has been following the hurricanes path. I suppose its good news that the hurricane is weakening at some point, but that doesnt necessarily mean that people in that part of the country can let down their guards or folks in mexico as well. We should
what we ve noticed is two important things about this track. not only is it speeding up, that forward speed continues to increase. it s also shifted a little further east. so, what that s going to do, just by the nature of the topography across the baja peninsula and into southern california, it means it will make landfall earlier than what we had anticipated, let s say, 12 hours ago. and also, with this increase in forward speed, if you ve been tuning in intermittently, this storm is more of a sunday storm for southern california and the southwestern u.s. so, we need, as weather kmurkters, to show you that because you may have anticipated a monday morning type of event but this is really sunday into monday and we have our flash flood threat across this region, a level four of four. some locations have never had this type of flood threat in all of its history. so, we re working on a major flooding potential with this system. this is the latest radar. dry along the coast, but look what