Currently in NYC — August 25 2023: A muggy mix of sun and clouds

The weather, currently.

Welcome to the unofficial last week of summer! I always love this week in the city because it’s so quiet. A lot of people are out of town or on vacation which means I get a seat on the subway. We kick off the work week with a blend of sunshine and cloud cover. The clouds have the edge and they’ll usher in showers overnight. Our day is muggy but not overwhelmingly so. Our high only hits 76°F. Looking ahead, temperatures are likely to remain in the upper 70s to low 80s which makes me very happy. Enjoy your Monday!

Bike Forecast:

8 out of 10

— Stacy Blundell

What you need to know, currently.

Tropical Storm Idalia formed over the weekend, and is ramping up its intensity on a trajectory towards Florida.

Tampa Bay is currently in the cone of uncertainty for Idalia. Up to 11 feet of storm surge is expected from Idalia near the exact landfall location, with about 3-5 feet expected in the Tampa Bay region.

Since records began in 1850, only 5 hurricanes have ever directly struck the Tampa Bay region. Since the last one struck in 1946, the region’s population has grown 10-fold, from around 300,000 to more than 3 million today.

Due to the gentle sloping of the seafloor on the Florida Gulf coast, this area is especially prone to coastal flooding from hurricanes. In a worst-case scenario, a major hurricane making landfall just north of Tampa Bay could funnel as much as 26 feet of storm surge into the bay. Last year, a study found that the Tampa Bay metro area was even more vulnerable than New Orleans to storm surge flooding — second only to Miami and New York in the US.

—Eric Holthaus

What you can do, currently.

The fires in Maui have struck at the heart of Hawaiian heritage, and if you’d like to support survivors, here are good places to start:

The fires burned through the capital town of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the ancestral and present home to native Hawaiians on their original unceded lands. One of the buildings destroyed was the Na ‘Aikane o Maui cultural center, a gathering place for the Hawaiian community to organize and celebrate.

If you’d like to help the community rebuild and restore the cultural center, a fund has been established that is accepting donations — specify “donation for Na ‘Aikane” on this Venmo link.