Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me. Im fredericka witfield. A Major Hurricane is barreling toward the southwestern u. S. Hurricane hilary has weakened to a category 3 as it hammers mexico with strong winds and high waves. Forecasters warn it could dump more than a years worth of rain across california, nevada and arizona in a short amount of time. The threat is so severe in the golden state that a Tropical Storm warning has been issued for the First Time Ever there. Cnn meteorologist Allison Chinchar is tracking the conditions. A years worth of rain in a short amount of time, how are they going to handle that . That is the big concern, because especially in the desert areas that ground is not able to absorb it very quickly, so a lot of it becomes runoff, leading to localized flash flooding. Sustained winds 125 Miles Per Hour gusting up to 155. Weve seen that Forward Movement pick up. Its starting to speed up. Thats important for the timing of a lot of the rain showers. W
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
anyone else. and i believe that we had what you would think would be the best case scenario. it was the best case scenario, because nobody was injured. cnn s peteman team and nadia romero joins us now live, thank you both for joining me. pete, first to you, what more have we learned? there were quite a few details in that press conference. reporter: the tupelo mayor said something so interesting, that cory wayne patterson, the person piloting the plane, apparently changed his mind. he wanted to hurt people on the ground after he stole this beechcraft commuter plane. it seats six or eight people. he wanted to crash it into the local walmart. there are two there in tupelo. police negotiates were able to get in touch with him via phone. he initially called 911. nego negotiators were able to get in touch with him and were able to get a pilot to talk to patterson on the phone. at one point they tried to steer the plane back to the tupelo regional airport and get cory wayne pat
Friday May 5, 2017 - Moderate to Heavy Rain EventLate Afternoon Localized Damaging Wind Event - Hudson Valley and Western New England (Gravity Wave Induced)What
the unnerving part comes when you are doing these things and the aircraft is getting tossed around a little bit by the storm. our aircraft is over 120,000 pounds when we fly through the eye wall at times. when it gets pushed around like a leaf in the wind, it s a little unnerving, but it s exciting. what we re doing up here to improve the forecast is something i can really get behind. to me it sounds a bit more unnerving than exciting. but i do get how important it is. what is the data that you ve been able to collect so far on idalia? oh, we have a lot of instrumentation that s running as we go through the storm. when we go through the center of the storm, we ll hunt for the center. we ll identify the exact low-pressure center, and if we do it right, we ll find the surface winds where they are exactly at zero knots, and that helps recalibrate the forecast. we also get radar data that can help feed into super computer