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Why Melissa’s intensification en route to Jamaica is so extraordinary
Jamaica is bracing for destruction as a rapidly intensifying Hurricane Melissa inches closer, threatening to make a direct strike as the most powerful storm to hit the nation in its history. The storm is expected to reach the main island as a Category 4 or 5 hurricane late Monday into early Tuesday.
Melissa, which was a tropical storm early Saturday, explosively strengthened into a Category 4 monster early Sunday — and it was still intensifying.
The storm will cause catastrophic flooding and landslides, exacerbated by its slow movement and Jamaica’s mountainous terrain. Up to 40 inches of rain as well as destructive winds and 9 to 13 feet of storm surge are expected leading up to and during landfall — probably including the area near the capital city of Kingston.
“Seek shelter now. Damaging winds and heavy rainfall today and on Monday will cause catastrophic and life-threatening flash flooding and numerous landslides before the strongest winds arrive Monday night and Tuesday morning,” the National Hurricane Center wrote in an update early Sunday.
The center said extensive infrastructural damage, long-duration power and communication outages and isolation of communities are expected.
And it’s possible Melissa could make three landfalls in fewer than three days.
In addition to Jamaica, home to about 2.8 million people, dangerous rain-related impacts from Melissa will also continue to be felt in Haiti, where at least three people have died according to local reports, as well as the Dominican Republic. Then the strong storm will strike eastern Cuba late Tuesday into Wednesday as a major hurricane, followed by the southern Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands from Wednesday into Thursday.
Melissa’s power is particularly notable. If the storm reaches Category 5 strength as predicted, it will become the third such storm to do so this Atlantic season — the second-highest total for any season on record and part of a trend toward more intense storms.
Melissa is churning across some of the warmest ocean waters in the world, which are also warmer than average, fueling violent thunderstorms that are efficiently converting oceanic heat and moisture into powerful updrafts — a process that accelerated Melissa’s strengthening and led to the formation of a clear, symmetric eye.
Jamaica is smaller than Connecticut — about 146 miles long and 51 miles wide — which means much of the island nation will bear the brunt of the storm.
The system is unlikely to directly affect the United States, guided out to sea by another storm near the East Coast next week, but some of its moisture could surge into New England and Atlantic Canada, contributing to late-week downpours.
Melissa now a major hurricane
Melissa was a Category 4 hurricane early Sunday, with sustained winds of 140 mph and higher gusts.
A day ago, Melissa had winds of 70 mph — which means it easily surpassed the threshold of 35 mph over 24 hours for a rapidly intensifying system.
In fact, Melissa’s pace of strengthening was twice the rate needed to qualify as rapid, making the storm extraordinary.
Residents spent the weekend battening down houses, securing sandbags and preparing to move to shelters further in from the coast, Sashana Small, a reporter for the Gleaner, a Kingston-based newspaper, said in an interview.
The island learned a difficult lesson from last year’s Hurricane Beryl, which left devastation across the Caribbean Islands. At least seven people died across Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Jamaica.
“People are scared because we had Hurricane Beryl last year,” Small said. “They are taking this one pretty seriously.”
Leaders of Jamaica’s main utility providers appeared together at a news conference on Sunday to discuss their plans to restore essential services in the hurricane’s wake. Hugh Grant, the head of the country’s electricity provider, said their teams would prioritize clearing vital roads to hospitals and airports, bringing supplies and equipment to the island via barge or planes and rebuilding damaged infrastructure.
Given Melissa’s projected intensity, the response is “likely to be a rebuild and not just a restoration,” Grant said.
“We are more resilient this year than last year,” Matthew Samuda, Jamaica’s minister of water, environment and climate change, said in a news conference Sunday. “But this is a bigger storm than last year and this is a potential direct hit.”
The U.S. military said in social media updates that it has evacuated nonessential personnel from Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, which also falls within Melissa’s projected path, to Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida.
Defense Department officials did not respond to questions about whether terrorism suspects the U.S. holds in Guantánamo Bay would be moved. There are at least eight U.S. warships in the Caribbean Sea that will be kept out of Melissa’s path.
Early Sunday, Melissa was about 120 miles southeast of Kingston and 280 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, lumbering along to the west at 5 mph. Its strengthening had slowed, or even plateaued. That’s to be expected as hurricanes don’t intensify linearly, but rather in fits and bursts. It will probably begin to intensify abruptly on Sunday evening.
Melissa spent part of Saturday drifting slightly south of due west. (Some meteorologists refer to southward-drifting storms as “gold-diggers,” since their digging, or southward, motion can bring them closer to extremely warm waters.) Indeed, Melissa now has slightly longer to spend over the warmest waters of the Atlantic and intensify further.
Hurricane warnings covered all of Jamaica, while watches were in effect for southern Haiti and the four easternmost provinces of Cuba. Tropical storm warnings also covered southern Haiti.
On Sunday morning, the Hurricane Hunters found Melissa’s eye to be 16 degrees warmer than the surrounding air outside the eye. Hurricanes are warm-core systems reminiscent of chimneys. The column of exceptional warmth at the center is a sign of an intense storm.
According to a weather model from Google, the storm has more than an 80 percent chance of intensifying into a Category 5 hurricane. The storm may fluctuate in intensity late Monday into Tuesday, so it’s unclear if it will be a Category 4 or 5 at landfall. Regardless, severe impacts are inevitable.
Life-threatening flash flooding, landslides and storm surge will probably hit southeastern Cuba on Tuesday, before the southern Bahamas and Turks and Caicos are lashed on Wednesday.
Why Melissa is so concerning
A slow, lumbering storm like Melissa is cause for great concern.
“In many cases, it’s a worst-case kind of scenario,” said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on climate change and weather for Yale Climate Connections and for years served with NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters.
A storm that inches along can subject places in its path to longer stretches of torrential rainfall, sustained winds and heightened storm surge. With Melissa, Masters said, he worries about the potential rainfall most of all.
Jamaica, for instance, is not especially susceptible to storm surge, though the airport in Kingston is low-lying and at risk of flooding, Masters said. In addition, he said, many structures on the island were rebuilt to withstand stronger wind speeds after the devastation of Hurricane Gilbert in 1988.
But, Masters said, the island is home to steep terrain that can be conducive to flash floods and mudslides.
Because tropical cyclones thrive on warm water, a storm that lingers in one spot can sometimes stir up cooler, deeper water and eventually weaken itself. But Masters pointed out that in parts of the region where Melissa is set to crawl along, the waters are 86 degrees as far as 200 feet below the surface.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “it’s over a part of the Caribbean that has deep, warm water.”
Jim Kossin, a retired NOAA climate scientist and hurricane expert, said that while it is clear climate change is making the strongest storms even stronger, researchers are continuing to investigate whether the planetary changes are also leading to more slow-moving storms that dump huge amounts of rain.
“There is a lot of observational evidence that this is happening more often now,” Kossin said.
He noted that Hurricane Harvey, which dumped as much as 5 feet of rain in parts of the Houston region in 2017, is “the poster child” of what is possible when a large storm stalls. “The whole area was just absolutely inundated with rainfall. The rain just kept falling in the same place.”
He, too, expressed worry about the multiple feet of rain that could fall on Jamaica, saying the mountains can make for “compounding events” such as flash flooding and mudslides that are as unpredictable as they are destructive and deadly.
“That’s the really scary part of these things,” Kossin said.
A benign season no more
Until Melissa, this year saw “one of the most benign hurricane seasons in a long time,” said Phil Klotzbach, a senior research scientist for the Department of Atmospheric Science in the Walter Scott Jr. College of Engineering at Colorado State University.
Over the summer, several monster storms have formed in the ocean and slowly crept toward land before hooking and swiveling back out to sea.
It’s been a lucky stretch as hurricanes trend toward becoming more powerful and destructive.
Melissa is set to break that quiet streak amid prime conditions for a formidable storm.
“I think our luck is going to run out,” Klotzbach said.
Matthew Cappucci and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
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