National Hurricane Center

Authored by Aaron Nelson via TheAntiMedia.org,

Residents of South Florida woke up yesterday morning to Hurricane Irma making landfall at 9:10 a.m. in the Florida Keys as a monster Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph.

The monster storm made a second landfall later at 3:35 p.m. near Marco Island as it continued traveling north along Florida’s Gulf Coast. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) expects Irma to continue overnight into Monday before finally losing hurricane strength status.

Update (8:00am ET): As it travels over the Florida Panhandle, Irma has been downgraded to a tropical storm. Yet it continues to produce some wind gusts that are near hurricane force.

Tropical Storm #Irma Advisory 49A: Now available on the NHC website. https://t.co/VqHn0uj6EM

— NHC Atlantic Ops (@NHC_Atlantic) September 11, 2017

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As we noted on Friday, sea-level analytics firm Climate Central had created a simulation based on the National Hurricane Center’s Coastal Emergency Risks Assessment storm surge and wave modeling that illustrated the devastating flooding in Miami that could result from Hurricane Irma’s storm surge. By overlaying the NHC data with a three-dimensional visual of the city obtained using Google maps, the firm created a realistic visual of what the city would look like under between seven and 11 feet of water.

After "carving a path of destruction through the Caribbean," a path which left 90% of Barbuda "uninhabitable" and nearly a million people without power in Puerto Rico, a slightly weakened, but still devastatingly massive Category-4 Hurricane Irma is closing in on Florida.  Here is the latest from the National Hurricane Center:

The National Hurricane Center (NHC) has just updated its forecast for what it is now referring to as a "rapidly intensifying" Category 2 hurricane in the Eastern Atlantic ocean and the results look disastrous for a large swath of the Caribbean and Southeastern United States.  Here is a brief summary of Hurricane Irma from the National Hurricane Center released at 11AM EST: