Two days ago, I wrote here that Tropical Storm Isaias would likely become a hurricane and threaten the northern Gulf Coast as a strong Category 2 after possibly attaining Category 3 status.
This afternoon, Isaias is a major Category 3 hurricane with 120 mph winds, moving north-northeast at 16 mph, and its center is expected to reach the western Florida Panhandle coast tonight. If you live from the Panhandle to coastal Alabama, tonight is the night to be somewhere safe. Life-threatening storm surge and devastating winds are likely.
This radar image from the Mobile National Weather Service radar shows the eye of the storm west of Tampa and due south of Mobile. The long line of showers and thunderstorms will be our next effect.
When Isaias comes ashore, it will be the 11th major hurricane to strike the Gulf Coast in the past 10 years. Stop and think about that. Eleven majors in ten years: Harvey, Irma, Michael, Laura, Zeta, Ida, lan, Idalia, Helene, Milton, and now Isaias. That has never happened since hurricane records began.
And here is the part that should get everyone’s attention. This is happening in an El Niño year, in a climate-warmed world, in a season our own Climate Adaptation Center forecast called for a below normal season. While that is true, we now have had 9 storms, 1 hurricane and 1 major hurricane. The old rules about what a season should look like simply do not apply anymore.
For the Suncoast, Isaias is mostly a rain story, but what a rain story. Sarasota has had about seven inches of rain in the past several days, all of it from the larger weather system that spun up this storm, the first hurricane and the first major hurricane of the 2026 season and it’s the 4th Gulf storm this year.
The satellite and radar show the storm’s long tail streaming our way, and that tail will hang over the Suncoast bringing scattered but locally intense showers and thunderstorms through Sunday.
I would not be surprised to see another inch or two, which would put a serious dent in our drought. If this feels familiar, it should. Heavy fall rains are exactly what strong El Niño’s deliver to Florida, and they play a big role in ending our droughts. The Excessive Rainfall Outlook from NOAA tells the story.
I keep coming back to something I wrote two days ago. Because the Suncoast was battered by the storms of 2024, a lot of us feel like we have had our turn, and the 2026 season slipped by almost unnoticed here. That is a mistake. Even tropical storms can do enormous damage in an age of sea level rise and the kind of super rainfall events a warming climate keeps serving up. It just takes one hurricane hitting the U.S. coast to make it a devastating season, and there is nowhere to run and no way to hide these days.
So, what do we do about eleven majors in ten years? We stop treating each one as a surprise and get serious about resilience, not just saying the words. That is what inspired the Living Lab for Coastal Resilience. The storms are coming faster and hitting harder, and the models we depend on are only as good as the data feeding them.
Right now, the high-resolution, street-level ground truth about our own shoreline barely exists. The Living Lab builds it: ten miles of Sarasota Bay wired with sensors, streaming continuous real-world data into local Al models, creating a working prototype that any coastal community facing the same future can copy.
We unveil it at our sixth annual Florida Climate Conference, Thursday, Nov. 12, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., at Selby Auditorium, 8350 N. Tamiami Trail. General admission is $109, students $55. Get your tickets here: https://theclimateadaptationcenter.networkforgood.com/events/103790-6th-annual-cac-florida-climate-conference-from-climate-risk-to-climate-resilience