frances is not a cat 5 storm...it is a cat 4 with winds of 140mph...cat 5 is 155mph.
137kt flight level winds correspond to 135-140mph at surface.
940mb doesn not correlate to a cat 5 either.
where did you get the info to post this was a cat 5 storm?
See above.
Category Five Hurricane:
Winds greater than 155 mph (135 kt or 249 km/hr).
The winds are actually faster as you increase altitude. The surface winds fortunately suffer from drag by contact with the ground and sea and don't go as fast as winds 100s of feet up.
It's generally the storm surge that does the real damage. The storm surge from a landfalling cat 4 can be as much as 10-20 feet.
Fortunately CHARLEY didn't get fully formed before it reached land and had only a 6-8 foot surge. We had about 4 feet 70-80 miles south of landfall.
Statement from Max Mayfield just released:
What we don't have a great deal of confidence with is if it's going to continue to go west-northwest into South Florida or start bending a little more toward the northwest," Mayfield said from the center near Miami.
"I'm afraid that even Thursday we're not going to have the definitive answer. The message pretty clearly here is that at this stage of the game, the bad news is we have a major hurricane headed in our general direction."
"We may have to go through the drill without knowing where it's going to hit," Mayfield said. "At this stage, it certainly looks like Florida will be impacted."
Courtesy
Eliot Kleinberg
Palm Beach Post