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Hello and welcome to the excerpt. I'm Elizabeth Wies. Today is Sunday, October 13th, 2024. Back in May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA,

predicted a record hurricane season.

And while it started out pretty quiet back in June,

we're certainly there now.

The cataclysmic devastation of Lane and now Milton

have cost hundreds of lives and caused billions of dollars in damage.

And there's still a month and a half to go in hurricane season.

What's behind these supersized storms and perhaps even more urgently what's next.

Here to help me understand all of the forces at play is Gus Olaka,

director of the Hurricane Research Division

at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab in Miami.

Thank you for joining me on the excerpt.

Happy to be here.

So let's start with the historic nature of these two most recent storms, Helain and Milton.

Hurricane Helain made landfall in Florida with a record storm surge and devastating

winds before it went on to the dump catastrophic amounts of rain in the

Appalachian Mountains, causing deadly flooding inland. Now Milton weakened

thankfully before it made landfall and we avoided the worst case scenarios,

but it still has caused at least 11 deaths.

So let's talk about the forces that has led to these storms, and let's start with the

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