Now that Wilma is somewhere beyond comprehension and still deepening, it seems safe to say that our
best case scenario would play out like Rita, missing the major metro areas and landfalling as a Cat3. Southwest Florida, like the Big Bend or coastal Mississippi, has long been recognized as being particularly vulnerable to surge, because the Gulf is so shallow. With Wilma expected to pass through the Yucatan Channel still as either a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, slowly meandering N-NNE until suddenly feeling the trough, hooking right while speeding up, and hopefully weakening some due to dry air, cooler SSTs, and the shear from that trough...basically, it means that somebody is most likely going to get hit with a monstrous storm surge on Florida's West Coast, and they're not going to even have a good idea of their true risk until only about 24 hours prior to landfall.
This is a completely different animal from Hurricane Charley because Hurricane Wilma peaked much higher (49mb higher, at least!), and like Katrina and Rita, will probably carry the windfield, rain potential, and storm surge of a Category Five storm all the way to western Florida, if not the windspeeds, while Charley basically worked vice versa, bringing Cat4 winds but not quite a Cat4 in windfield, rains, or surge. The dotted black line means alot less here than it did in Charley, but that surge won't take aim until 24 hours out, meaning this could be a PR nightmare as far as evacuations go.
Anyway, this is a surge map for Collier County, Florida:
Notice just how huge a bullet they dodged during Charley - Fort Myers (or any similar city like St. Mark's, Spring Hill, Tampa/St. Pete, Sarasota, Naples, Key West) would be washed away like Biloxi.
