Hurricane Melissa Slams Jamaica, Now Waiting To Learn The Toll. Likely Will Be Awful

 Hurricane Melissa kept strengthening right until landfall. 

Hurricane hunter planes measuring the strength of
Hurricane Melissa had this view of the storm
inside the eye yesterday 

Sustained winds blew at 185 mph at landfall, something very few people in the world have had the trauma of experiencing.

 In the western hemisphere, perhaps only a couple of hurricanes have made landfall with winds that strong. 

Melissa came ashore midday near New Hope, about 75 miles west of the Kingston, the Capitol of Jamaica. 

It had to be terrifying. Safe here on a bright, blue sky gorgeous late fall day here in Vermont, my heart rate is up just thinking about what those Jamaicans are going through today. 

Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite internet service, will be free for now in Jamaica and the Bahamas so people can get the word out, and tell loved ones who lived, who died. 

Still, won't get a lot of details on death toll, the extent of damage, and recovery right away. In western Jamaica, it's too dangerous to go outside and look.  People will also be just trying to survive. Most won't have time to chat with reporters or post updates online. 

Where Melissa hit square on in southwest Jamaica, the storm was the equivalent of a high end EF-3 or EF-4 tornado. Except tornadoes last only a few minutes and are usually no more than a mile wide  This "tornado" probably lasted more than an hour at least, and was probably 20 to 30 miles wide. 

Imagine your house getting hit by a tornado with 185 mph winds. There wouldn't be all that much left. Now imagine your house getting hit by a dozen or more of such tornadoes, one after another. 

How do you even survive such a thing?

Houses surely disintegrated in the midst of Melissa.   I don't know how many people made it to a hopefully safe shelter and how many stayed in their vulnerable homes.

Most people would be blown off their feet in winds and knocked to the ground in winds of 80 mph.  I don't know for sure if this is accurate, but Google AI says a 180 mph wind is enough launch a person into the air. 

Then those people would become like the rest of the debris flying through the air, trees, branches, planks, sheet metal, siding, roofs. The chances of surviving outdoors in that are pretty much zero. 

The National Hurricane Center was advising people near the eye of Hurricane Melissa to hide under mattresses in an interior room and wear a helmet.  "The best thing you can do is put as many walls as possible between you and the outside," the NHC said. 

Satellite view of Hurricane Melissa late this
afternoon shows the eye has filled in with
clouds as the mountains of Jamaica 
begin to weaken the still
formidable storm. 

Hurricane Melissa had been forecast for a couple days to make landfall in southwestern Jamaica. I'm hoping everyone who could fled to eastern Jamaica. 

The eastern part of the island is having an incredibly tough go at it too. But at least the winds in the east are probably not strong enough to destroy all buildings. Sturdy ones should hold up.   

Images that are coming out of Jamaica are showing catastrophic flooding, with rapidly flowing water in some

As of 5 p.m., Hurricane Melissa was still centered over western Jamaica, heading northeast with top winds of 145 mph.  The mountainous terrain is starting to damage the hurricane, thank gawd. That's down to an intense category 4 hurricane, no longer, a category 5. 

RECORD SETTING

It's unusual for a hurricane to keep on strengthen right up until landfall, but Melissa did. The most recent, dramatic example of a hurricane doing this that I can think of was Category 5 Hurricane Michael, which hit Florida in 2018. 

It looks like Hurricane Melissa probably tied the record for the Atlantic basin for the highest winds and lowest central air pressure at landfall. The air pressure was 892 millibars in the eye, which is an incredibly intense hurricane. 

The reason I say "probably" is because scientists will need to study data after the fact to determine whether the sort of off the cuff measurements taken today are accurate.

WHAT'S NEXT

Hurricane Melissa is still headed toward eastern Cuba, where it will hit tonight with winds as high as 145 mph.  Obviously incredibly nasty flooding is going to happen there, too. 

The hurricane will be weakening, and increasing its forward speed tomorrow as it blasts the southeast Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos. But it will still be a dangerous storm. 

Hurricane Melissa is still throwing lots of moisture at Hispaniola, so Haiti and parts of the Dominican Republic should continue to experience catastrophic flooding tonight. 

The weakening hurricane should sideswipe Bermuda early Friday. As Melissa finally dies over the North Atlantic Friday, it will send some moisture into an otherwise unrelated storm over the Northeast, which will probably make rainfall heavier than it otherwise would be. .

CLIMATE CHANGE STRIKES AGAIN

Hurricane Melissa is the latest in a remarkable string of Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic in recent years. Melissa was the third such hurricane this year. The other two missed land, but our luck ran out with Melissa. 

This hurricane meandered over record warm Caribbean water for days before striking Jamaica, allowing it to strengthen as it did. I mentioned this yesterday, but it's worth repeating. Expect plenty more Melissas in the future. 

Per CNN:

"Hurricane Melissa's intensification into the strongest storm on Earth so far this year, and one of the strongest storms on record in the Atlantic Ocean, was field buy unusually hot ocean temperatures in the Caribbean. 

The storms underwent two periods of rapid intensification, with its maximum sustained winds first jumping from 70 mph on Saturday morning to 140 mph just 24 hours later. Then, from Sunday afternoon through Monday afternoon its peak winds spiked again, going from 140 to mph to 175 mph.

Such bouts of rapid intensification are becoming more frequent as the climate warms. Hurricane Melissa is only the latest in a sting of intense Atlantic hurricanes this year to undergo such extreme rapid strengthening. 

According to the climate science research group Climate Central, the ocean temperatures in the vicinity of Hurricane Melissa's path were about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit above average for this time of year. 

The group calculated that along the entire path of the storm so far, the unusually hot sea surface temperatures were at least 500 to 800 times more likely due to global warming."