The odd routing wouldn’t be totally unprecedented—Hurricane Ivan made landfalls in Alabama and Florida’s Atlantic coast in 2004.
As Florida’s gulf coast continues to hunker down ahead of Hurricane Idalia’s arrival Wednesday morning as an “extremely dangerous” storm, those on the state’s Atlantic coast are also being warned to keep an eye on the tropical system this weekend.
That’s because the Global Forecasting System, a U.S. federal hurricane projection model, predicts the remnants of Hurricane Idalia could circle back and strike Florida a second time early next week.
If Idalia stays true to the GFS forecast, it’d strike Florida’s big bend region on Wednesday morning before traversing across North Florida—where flash flooding, heavy rainfall, and winds in excess of 100 mph are forecasted—and eventually through Georgia and South Carolina, back into the Atlantic.
From there, federal spaghetti models forecast Idalia could take a southwest turn and head back toward Florida’s Atlantic coast for a second landfall in the Sunshine State sometime Monday—albeit after losing much of its original power.
Ummmm… what? #wxx #wxtwitter pic.twitter.com/jPEWQWPrIE
— Pettus Weather (@PettusWX) August 28, 2023
The bizarre scenario is far from a certainty, with outside forecasting models—like the more-trusted European model ECMWF—predicting a different path for Idalia entirely. The looping phenomena of a tropical system is rare, but not unprecedented.
In 2004, Hurricane Ivan made landfall in Alabama—clipping the Florida panhandle—as a major Category 3 hurricane before it traversed across the American South and into the Atlantic Ocean, looping back to make a second landfall with Florida as an extratropical cyclone. From there, it eventually re-entered the Gulf of Mexico and became a tropical storm that delivered heavy rain to Louisiana and Texas more than a week after its initial landfall…
Federal GFS Model Shows Hurricane Idalia Could Hit Florida TWICE (thedailybeast.com)
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