around 85 degrees fahrenheit. so there s nothing to prevent this storm from continuing to intensify. cnn teams are spread out covering this storm and preps that are under way. let s begin with meteorologist chad myers who just got an update from the national hurricane center. what is the latest? it s still at 130 miles per hour. earlier today, it was 140, but we lost the inner eyewall. an outer eyewall tried to build. it s normal. just like rapid intensification, that s another term we used yesterday. we re not seeing that now, but that could come into play again tomorrow. the hurricane hunter that you just talked to here, you had that sound on there, came in from the west. flew around the entire hurricane, and then left. and at the same time, he was dropping these little dropsawns like parasuits coming down. and what that was doing is telling the computer models and telling him as he was flying
hurricane florence we begin with breaking news because of this hurricane that is bearing down on the east coast right now, a hurricane watch has just been issued from south carolina to the north carolina/virginia border. florence is barreling towards the u.s. coast. let s get right to cnn meteorologist chad myers, he s tracking the path for us. so how fast is this moving? when do you think it s going to make landfall? moving now at 15 miles per hour and that s more than we ve seen yesterday. we were somewhere around 9 or 10 miles per hour yesterday, getting over very warm water. we had what we think is an eyewall replacement cycle overnight. yesterday our big word was rapid intensification, this is a new one today. the inner eyewall has really fell apart, an outer eyewall tried to build and is trying right now and that will restrengthen the storm. i think the hurricane hunter aircraft is in there right now, not that long ago left charleston, it is flying through headed toward the eye
lowe s home improvement store, they say those shelves will be restocked as quickly as they can. they are already sent out 550 truckloads as of last night to help that restocking process and that will continue, john. kaylee watching things. i want you to take one more look at what this storm, hurricane florence, looks like from space. look at that eyewall just churning. that is what is heading right now to the east coast of the united states, the city of wilmington in north carolina right now the most likely city to leave a direct hit or near direct hit. joining us now is the mayor of wilmington, north carolina, bill saffo. mayor, thank you very much for being with us this morning. why don t you just briefly tell us what your city is doing to prepare. well, you know, we re a resilient bunch down here, we go through a lot of these hurricane scares throughout the years, but this is pretty serious. we have prepared, we continue to prepare our community and our
have coming. our goal is to protect lives and property. now we know that this evacuation order that i m issuing is going to be inconvenient for some people. but we are not going to gamble with the lives of the people of south carolina, not a one. that s why we re doing what we re doing. bill: senior meteorologist janice dean live in the weather center watching it. that s the status of florence? we re seeing eyewall replacement cycle. this is what s happening right now and this is what s happened overnight. it means the storm is trying to strengthen so it is going through some reorganization so that it can perhaps get stronger and i would not put past the fact that we could see a category 5 later on today or tomorrow. the storm is still a category 4. it has weakened a little bit going through the eyewall replacement cycle. the outer eyewall is taking
tens of millions of people are in irma s path right now and told to prepare for the worst. stay with us throughout this hour as we put you on the ground right in the path of this monster storm. first, a better look where the storm is heading right now. that means chad myers is standing by to give us the latest on the forecast, the track of hurricane irma. chad what are you seeing? i see finally now that the u.s. model we talked about yesterday and the european model that we talked about yesterday are finally agreeing. and they are agreeing on the european version of what they had yesterday. right over the florida keys. very close to marathon florida. 150 miles per hour. eyewall replace innocent cycle going on. means an outer eyewall bigger. cut off everything to the inner eyewall, where all the wind was. didn t make it any less strong. just made the winds in the middle a little less. now that says 4.