He mentions an 8 foot storm surge.
Track update: Still heading for Florida coast
Matthew continues heading on a northwest track that will take it just west of New Providence Island, putting Nassau in the most intense part of the storm’s dangerous right-hand side. However, Matthew may head just far enough west to avoid the worst-case impacts for Nassau, most likely tracking over parts of Andros Island. Unlike the mountainous parts of eastern Cuba and western Haiti that took a toll on Matthew as it crossed them, Andros is a very flat island, so it should have little or no effect on the storm.
Should Matthew continue on its due-northwest track, it would come uncomfortably close to making landfall along the urban corridor from Miami to Palm Beach. Our most reliable track models insist that Matthew will begin angling just to the right before landfall, which would keep the southern part of this corridor on Matthew’s weaker side. Broward County (including Fort Lauderdale) is in a hurricane warning, while Miami-Dade County is in a tropical storm warning. The risk of dangerous impacts, including hurricane-force winds, ramps up greatly from Palm Beach northward. The most recent NHC forecast (see Figure 2 above) keeps Matthew as a Category 4 hurricane as it reaches the Melbourne area on Friday morning and a strong Category 3 by Friday evening just east of Jacksonville. The 00Z Thursday run of the GFS model agrees very closely with the official NHC track. Hurricane Warnings are now in effect from Broward County to Fernandina Beach, Florida, with a Hurricane Watch extending northward to Edisto Beach, South Carolina.
If NHC’s forecast were to prove spot-on, conditions along Florida’s central and northern Atlantic coast could easily top anything observed in many decades. As we noted this afternoon, the Melbourne area--including Kennedy Space Center--has never recorded a major hurricane. Hurricane Dora struck near St. Augustine, FL, as a Category 3 in 1965, but otherwise the Jacksonville area and its 1.5 million residents have never experienced a hurricane of this magnitude. A northward-moving “coast scraper” hurricane has the potential to cause widespread damage over an enormous swath of populated area. In general, the storm surge threat with such a storm would be less than for a perpendicular landfall, but as the Atlantic coast begins curving toward Georgia, the risk of dangerous storm surge will rise markedly, with inundations of up to 8 feet possible from Sebastian Inlet, FL, to the Georgia/South Carolina border.
The bottom line: Matthew continues to pose a potentially dire threat to much of Florida’s Atlantic coast, with major impacts likely along the Georgia coast and potentially further north.
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/matthews-shrieking-winds-hit-bahamas
Anyway, I'll feel a lot better if in a couple days I can say once again, "yeah, they over dramatized it". I'll take drama to trauma anytime.
