Hurricane Milton enters the Atlantic Ocean after devastating Florida.
Milton caused at least five deaths and compounded the misery caused by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago, while avoiding a direct hit on the city of Tampa.
The storm weakened in recent hours and made landfall Wednesday night as a Category 3 storm on Siesta Key, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) south of Tampa.
The storm left more than three million customers without power and triggered an onslaught of tornadoes.
While it caused a lot of damage and water levels may continue to rise for days, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said it was not “a worst-case scenario.”
Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told Al Jazeera that the powerful storms experienced by the southeastern United States in recent years are partly a result of human-caused climate change.
“By putting so many greenhouse gases, carbon-containing gases, into the atmosphere that trap more heat at the surface, most of that heat goes into the ocean,” Francis said.
“And we know that the heat of the ocean is the fuel that these storms feed on. What this additional energy does to these storms is make them stronger, intensify them more quickly, [and] “The evaporation of the extra warm water provides more moisture for them to use as rain, and we have seen very intense rainfall totals coming out of these storms,” he added.
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