Hurricane Melissa put on a rare show overnight, tipping the scales as a Category 5 hurricane by the predawn hours Monday while drifting only about 100 miles south of Jamaica over the deep, warm waters of the central Caribbean.
As we noted in Sunday’s newsletter, Melissa becomes the 45th Category 5 hurricane on record (official records begin in 1851) in the Atlantic basin and the astounding 3rd Category 5 hurricane this season. Only the destructive 2005 hurricane season recorded as many or more Category 5s in a single season, with Category 5s Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma punctuating one of the deadliest and most destructive hurricane seasons on record.
Taking advantage of extreme Caribbean warmth
Melissa showed resistance Sunday to the usual internal processes like eyewall replacement cycles that might put a speed limit on its strength.
After rapidly intensifying from Saturday to Sunday, Melissa’s pressure steadily fell throughout the day, with only a short stairstep-like pause in its strengthening winds from late morning until early afternoon yesterday.
Shortly before midnight Sunday, Melissa’s already powerful core underwent a wild and chaotic burst of activity, with a swarm of lightning strikes suddenly encircling its eye as violent thunderstorm tops and intense convection pushed into the lower stratosphere, allowing the cold cirrus canopy surrounding Melissa’s warm eye to hit new heights.
Melissa’s blowup coincided with a track dip slightly southwestward over a so-called warm-core eddy – a clockwise ring of extremely warm water south of Jamaica not unlike the much larger loop-current related warm-core eddy that famously led to Katrina’s rapid blowup over the Gulf in 2005.
Melissa makes satellite history
From a satellite perspective, early Monday Melissa resembled some of the most notorious super typhoons of the western North Pacific, with indirect satellite intensity estimates soaring to unprecedented levels for an Atlantic hurricane.
The eponymous Dvorak satellite intensity estimation technique – the de facto standard for estimating hurricane intensity for over half a century in the absence of direct observations – hit its highest estimate ever for an Atlantic hurricane Monday morning. Only one other Atlantic basin hurricane since the technique’s inception in the early 1970s – Category 5 Gilbert in 1988, for now Jamaica’s hurricane-of-record – observed a Dvorak estimate of T8.0, the highest tropical number, or t-number, on the scale that ranges from 1 to 8.
Melissa reached an unadjusted T8.3 value, unprecedented for the Atlantic basin.
Typically, a current satellite intensity value of 8.0 would suggest a Category 5 hurricane with pressures below 900 mb and winds nearing 200 mph. In the case of Melissa, observations from hurricane hunters have been finding consistently weaker winds and higher pressures than satellite estimates would otherwise suggest.
That said, Melissa is solidly a Category 5 hurricane (winds of at least 157 mph), with routine hurricane hunter flights measuring surface adjusted winds of around 165 mph and a minimum pressure of 908 mb as of 11 AM ET Monday. Melissa holds the record for the lowest pressure recorded for an Atlantic hurricane this late in the hurricane season.
Though we would expect an eyewall replacement cycle to commence before too long – which could temporarily weaken Melissa but at the expense of its destructive wind field growing – so far we’ve seen no evidence of that process occurring just yet.
Although predicting short-term fluctuations in intensity for upper-echelon hurricanes is very difficult, all guidance indicates Melissa will remain a catastrophic hurricane when it hits Jamaica Tuesday.
Jamaica bracing for the worst
As we discussed in Sunday’s newsletter, Melissa’s tracked slightly south of earlier forecasts, which has kept its destructive core south of Jamaica so far. Winds have at times gusted to above tropical storm strength (39 mph or higher), but hurricane winds remain confined to a 30 mile circle around Melissa’s eye, hovering about 75 to 100 miles south of Jamaica Monday morning.
As Melissa turns sharply northeast today, it will begin to speed up toward southern Jamaica. Hurricane conditions should hit southern parts of the island early Tuesday, with landfall anticipated on the west side of the island around sunrise Tuesday.
Assuming it stays a relatively compact hurricane and isn’t structurally changed from a last-minute eyewall replacement cycle, the exact landfall location is crucial to which parts of Jamaica experience the worst of Melissa’s catastrophic winds and storm surge, so well-timed or poorly-timed 11th hour deviations will be crucial, especially for the heavily-populated eastern side of the island that includes Kingston and Spanish town, home to about a million people.
Catastrophic storm surge is expected to top 13 feet or more along Jamaica’s south coast near and immediately east of where its center comes ashore.
Regardless of track, life-threatening flash flooding and landslides will plague Jamaica from today through Tuesday, with up to 40 inches (1000 mm) of rain in some spots, particularly in mountainous areas at the eastern tip of the island.
Additionally, Melissa’s catastrophic winds could be noticeably stronger in the higher elevations than what’s indicated officially by the National Hurricane Center, which estimates winds near the ocean surface, typically weaker than what’s observed a few thousand feet up. Expect widespread and extended power and communications outages throughout the island.
Melissa island hopping after Jamaica
Conditions will improve dramatically in Jamaica by late Tuesday as Melissa accelerates away and toward eastern Cuba.
The hurricane is forecast to strike eastern Cuba near Santiago de Cuba in the window from late Tuesday night through the pre-dawn hours Wednesday still as a major Category 3 hurricane, bringing winds above 115 mph and a significant storm surge reaching 9 feet or more to Cuba’s southeast coast.
Melissa’s interaction with the high terrain of Jamaica and Cuba should weaken it some to a Category 1 or 2 hurricane before it accelerates through the southeastern Bahamas, passing near Crooked Island and west of the Turks and Caicos on Wednesday into early Thursday.
Interests in Bermuda will need to monitor the forecasts for a possible Halloween threat, with Melissa making its closest pass, likely as a hurricane, by Friday.
Melissa poses no threat to the United States and will be whisked out to sea east of Atlantic Canada this weekend.
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