Debby Strengthens To Hurricane Hours Before Florida Landfall

welcome back into our special coverage of Debbie which is now a hurricane according to the 11: p.m. advisory from the National Hurricane Center the second hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season right now it's 75 m per hour category 1 storm it is still moving North at 12 milph and about 65 miles to the west southwest of Cedar Key in Florida slowly getting more organized and still expected to be a solid category 1 hurricane as it makes landfall that's going to be early tomorrow morning in the Big Ben region of Florida where 6 to 10 feet of storm surge is expected along with exceptionally heavy rain as the storm slowly comes up and across North Florida and SouthEast Georgia now beyond that you've got this very strange looking uh cone here and you know if I'll explain it this way so each one of these forecast points is there's a circle with that that is the average forecast error and the average forecast error is growing over time and so it's doing something like this and then by the time you get much much farther out in time uh then that average forecast error is getting larger and it's getting larger and that's why you have this very bulbous appearance at the end here that doesn't look like a typical cone it's because the storm is basically going to slow down and almost stall over parts of the southeast which is very bad news because that's going to mean multiple days of onshore flow of strong wind and also very heavy rain so as always one of the biggest concerns with this storm for us is the Heavy Rain there is an outlook for flooding from the weather prediction center that includes this high risk this is not something that we see very often it happens a few times or several times a year generally and uh that high risk also extending farther north into to Southeast Georgia and into parts of South Carolina Tuesday morning and into Wednesday morning so it's possible that this storm could do something like some of the you know really big events in recent years you think about storms like Florence you think about storms like Matthew we're not saying that it's necessarily going to be just like that but it is possible that we could see truly catastrophic flooding from the storm because it's just not going to move very quickly