With hurricane season weeks away, it seemed like a good time to whip up a script to plot cyclone-scale radar.
Several hours prior to landfall, Hurricane Ian peaked at Category 5 (140 knots/937 millibars) just offshore Florida around sunrise on September 28, 2022. The eye made landfall later that afternoon as a Category 4 (110 knots/947 millibars).
Now to hope my source for the data doesn’t end up being deleted by DOGE before I get the chance to use it again … (kidding, sort of).
Hurricane Ian ravaged Fort Myers and other Gulf Coast locations with historic storm surge flooding, as frighteningly shown below in images captured remotely by storm chaser Max Olson.
In the process it became Florida’s costliest hurricane. The 161 deaths also ranked it as the worst for the state for fatalities since 1935’s Labor Day storm.
Due to its extreme nature and devastating impacts, the name was retired by the World Meteorological Organization. Idris will replace the name when the rotating list next appears in 2028.
I’ll try to put together a couple more of these at some point soon.