This map of how Hurricane Irma would look over Europe shows just how huge a storm it is

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September 11, 2017 1:55 PM

The Washington Post created a handy graphic to help visualise the size of the historic hurricane.

Hurricane Irma is a storm of historic proportions — but far away from hurricane country it can be tough to appreciate just how big it is.

This map shows the exact dimensions of the storm, transposed over western Europe. It was tweeted by Max Roser, a data visualisation researcher at the University of Oxford.

With its eye around the French-German border, the storm stretches far enough to comfortably reach a dozen countries, from the UK and France in the west, Italy in the south, Poland in the east and Denmark in the north.

The snapshot was provided by a tool, which allows users to drop a visual of the storm anywhere in the world.

Taken from another view, the storm is easily big enough to swallow the whole UK, all of Ireland, and to touch on Continental Europe at the same time:

Before reaching the US, the real Hurricane Irma swept through the Caribbean islands of Antigua and Barbuda, St. Martin, British Virgin Islands, US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas, and Cuba.

The state of Florida could see up to 18 inches of rain, with the Florida Keys getting as much as 25 inches of rain, Governor Rick Scott told reporters on Saturday.

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