How big is Hurricane Ian? The massive storm is twice as wide as the Florida peninsula

Hurricane Ian is like less than one day away from slamming into southwest Florida but in many ways, the storm arrived days ago.

That’s because the storm is massive, according to the National Weather Service. From east to west, it stretches nearly 500 miles, twice the width of the part of the state it will soon hit. Clouds connected to the storm can be found in satellite imagery as far south as Cuba and as far north as Washington D.C. — a distance of 1,200 miles.

National Weather Service meteorologist Rick Davis said the storm’s size is part of why it’s so dangerous.

“This storm is so large that it’s going to affect people from Tampa down to Naples,” said Davis, who works in the NWS’ Tampa Bay office. “Even if the eye itself doesn’t pass you, the wind field is huge. The storm surge is big. It’s going to impact a large area.”

As a result, Davis said, it’s important to not compare Hurricane Ian to other storms. Hurricane Charley has been an example floating around as a similar storm. It made landfall 18 years ago as a Category 4 storm near Fort Myers, 90 miles south of Bradenton.

However, Charley was incredibly small in size. It’s hurricane-force winds extended just 10 miles, so people a few towns over from where it made landfall saw few, if any, impacts and little damage. Hurricane Ian, by comparison, has an eye that is currently 40 miles wide and hurricane force winds that extend another 100 miles beyond that.

“This storm is going to be so much more impactful than Charley, because if you were right in the path of Charley, it was a very destructive storm. But if you were 30 miles away, it wasn’t that bad,” Davis said. “This one, if you’re 30 miles away, it’s going to be destructive. If you’re 100 miles away, it’s still going to be a bad storm.”

This story was originally published September 27, 2022 at 7:26 PM with the headline "How big is Hurricane Ian? The massive storm is twice as wide as the Florida peninsula."

Chase Karacostas

The Sun News

Chase Karacostas writes about tourism in Myrtle Beach and across South Carolina for McClatchy. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2020 with degrees in Journalism and Political Communication. He began working for McClatchy in 2020 after growing up in Texas, where he has bylines in three of the state’s largest print media outlets as well as the Texas Tribune covering state politics, the environment, housing and the LGBTQ+ community.