Hurricane Ian is tracking toward the Florida coast as the storm threatens to make a historic landfall within hours.
The storm has rapidly intensified into a Category 4 hurricane, and the National Hurricane Center’s predicted path is entirely focused on central Florida.
If the predictions are accurate, Hurricane Ian will make landfall in the U.S. somewhere relatively near Fort Myers Wednesday afternoon. The storm will slowly move inland as it turns northward and carves across central Florida.
Hurricane Ian’s predicted slowdown has links to climate change, which has contributed to an increase in hurricanes stalling, thus increasing flooding and destruction caused by the storms.
As of Wednesday morning, Hurricane Ian is threatening to bring storm surge of up to 12 feet to some areas of the coast between Bonita Beach and Fort Myers. Tampa Bay is expecting up to six feet of storm surge as of Wednesday morning.
As the storm continues to approach, several webcams show realtime conditions across the central Florida coastline.
See the following webcams below to see for yourself what it looks like as Hurricane Ian approaches.
Live webcams show Hurricane Ian lashing Florida
WWLive appears to be an aggregator of webcam feeds, and that creator has combined feeds from Dania Beach, Tampa, Fort Myers Beach, Cocoa Beach, Jacksonville, along with an unlabeled parking lot feed.
Hundreds of people were watching the beach webcam of the PierSide Grill restaurant in the Fort Myers area Wednesday morning, but that live stream appeared to have ended as of 11a.m. ET. It showed a stretch of beach not far from where Hurricane Ian could potentially make landfall.
See Florida traffic cams, road conditions as Hurricane Ian nears landfall
A YouTube channel called Florida Traffic has collected live feeds of traffic webcams operated by the Florida Department of Transportation and paired it with Tampa Bay-area weather radio audio from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
For Hurricane Ian updates, check out the National Hurricane Center forecasts and follow them on Twitter.