Da'Vel Johnson

Clear sky and a full moon

Nighttime polar orbiter satellite photos of Jamaica before and after #Melissa show how the power grid was affected. Melissa knocked out power to about 77% of Jamaica’s customers, said Minister of Local Government Desmond McKenzie. Photos from worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov

Jamaicans take stock after Hurricane Melissa causes damage, flooding and power cuts With communication networks in Jamaica crippled, the true scale of the disaster remains unknown.

“Once we arrived in central Jamaica we started to see how severely the island has been hit. The town of Mandeville has been, for want of a better word, flattened. A petrol station had lost its roof and most of its pumps.”
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Fantastic image. What camera and lens are you using?

The amount of vegetation and power infrastructure loss will take months even years to recover.

The satellite derived wind field really puts the scale into prospective. Around half the Jamaica will see hurricane force winds from Melissa, but several parishes (Westmoreland, Saint Elizabeth, Manchester, Saint James, Trelawny) will see extreme winds over 95kts/110 mph. Higher in the mountains.

#Melissa unfortunately is still intensifying. A 9am EDT Tropical Cyclone Update indicates that winds are up to 180 mph, with an estimated minimum pressure of 896 mb.

You can see how GLM lightning has 📈 in the past hour, encircling the eye, with eye WV temp still increasing!

Waiting on a dropsonde to confirm, but Melissa is most certainly below 900 hPa right now.

Tragically we are about to witness the 2nd or 1st deepest Atlantic hurricane landfall by min MSLP on record in Jamaica.

The western end of Jamaica where #Melissa is projected to make landfall has the least well-built structures of anyplace on the island. Graphic is from a 2021 paper, "Poverty and hurricane risk exposure in Jamaica": www.researchgate.net/publication/...

What we're witnessing with #Melissa is ultra rare in the history of known hurricanes in the Atlantic. This level of sustained intensity and feasting on every joule of ocean heat content without any real disruption is incredible.

Not hyperbole: Jamaica is facing a generational catastrophic event.

The monster eye at the center of a still strengthening Hurricane Melissa.

Sunrise on Hurricane Melissa.

Melissa is now a Category 4 storm with sustained winds of 140 mph.

Melissa has rapidly intensified into a category 4 major hurricane according to preliminary NHC estimates:
- from 60 to 120 kt in 24 hours (⬆️ 60 kt)
- from 90 to 110 kt in just 6 hours (⬆️ 20 kt)

This slow-moving storm will not only deliver damaging winds & storm surge but also catastrophic rainfall.

Category 4 🚨
Major Hurricane Melissa
5:00 AM EDT Sun Oct 26
Location: 16.3°N 76.3°W
Moving: W at 5 mph
Min pressure: 944 mb
Max sustained: 140 mph

(image via @tropicaltidbits.bsky.social)

Recon is finding #Melissa notably stronger, at about 85kt with pressure having dropped all the way to 971mb. The wind field is much more coherent and symmetric, and there are double hot towers trying to surround the eye. Could see some impressive intensification rates from recon this evening

Official graphic depicting potential rainfall from Melissa in the Carribbean from the National Hurricane Center. Over 30-40 inches may locally fall in the mountains of Jamaica. Note that additional rainfall may fall, beyond indicated here, outside of the 4 day window mentioned.

Jamaica, in particular, will likely suffer catastrophic impacts from now rapidly-intensifying (but slow-moving) Hurricane #Melissa. A *Category 5* landfall now appears to be the most likely outcome, & 30-40+ inches of *additional* rain in mountains will lead to extreme flooding.

And here we go again with Hurricane #Melissa. RI ongoing and expected to continue.

Preparation should be completed today as worsening impacts begin Sunday and Monday into early next week.

With the GFS coming more in-line with the rest of the model guidence this afternoon, it confirms that Tropical Storm Melissa will produce near-historic amounts of rainfall and flooding for Jamaica, Hispanola, and eastern Cuba when it makes landfall as a major hurricane.

#Melissa is about to undergo rapid intensification (RI). And I anticipate it will be quite explosive. A classic cyan ring on 37 GHz imagery from this GMI overpass at 1447 UTC.

Major flooding being predicted Sunday afternoon at Cape May Harbor, NJ.

The current forecast at Cape May Harbor Sunday afternoon has major flooding. Uh oh.

This will be a common sight across #SaintAugustine into the weekend. Continuous periods of heavy rainfall combined with a developing Nor’easter off the coast will contribute to flooding across the area. Never drive through flooded roadways. Good news: much drier next week. #wx

What a shame.

A textbook example of concentric eyewalls in Super Typhoon #Ragasa as seen from Chinese radars. This and other radar loops are available at bmcnoldy.earth.miami.edu/tropics/radar/.
#HuajiashaCN

There are a lot of NWS positions now posted on USAJobs. Come work with us! I guarantee you'll have a tough time finding public servants more passionate about the work they do. www.usajobs.gov/search/resul...

Half-baked notion, so caveats. But if LLMs are basically trained on our collective work without permission or consent and then used to routinize much of that work, a large share of the capital gains should go to a national fund dividend, analogous to the Alaska Fund, that pays us all.

This is exactly how I feel. Our words, art, and data have value and we should be compensated for its use.

⛈️⛈️⛈️

Twenty years ago today, Hurricane Katrina (2005) made landfall in Louisiana.

Four years ago today, Hurricane Ida (2021) made landfall in Louisiana.

This animation shows Katrina on the left and Ida on the right over the same 24-hour period using NOAA Merged IR (left) and NOAA ABI Band 13 (right).

Neat Mercury / Venus action going on this morning.