Melissa has made the turn to the northeast and is slowly headed towards eastern Jamaica. Here is the Infrared view over the last couple of hours:
As always your best source of information is the National Hurricane Center, and the best overview is their one page “Key Messages” product: Key messages regarding Hurricane Melissa (en Español: Mensajes Claves). Here’s the estimated impact swath using my TAOS(tm)/Lachesis economic impact model:
To get this out of the way, obviously no impacts (other than waves/rip currents later in the week) for the US. And here is zoomed in on Jamaica:
Melissa is a very powerful Saffir-Simpson Category 5 storm. However, Melissa is very small. While the landfall location matters, the size of the storm in this case is a critical component. The center of the eye landfall location isn’t critical, what is critical is that swath of hurricane force winds. The bright pink area and near white area swath is the region of maximum destruction.
The fortunate thing is Melissa is a very small storm – the radius of hurricane force winds only extends about 30 miles east, and 22 miles west of the track. The R50 (50 knot) wind only 60 miles or so right (east), 40 or so west. That’s about half the size of a typical storm. Depending on how much that wind field expands in the next few hours (it is expected to grow some), it will still be a very compact storm. So Jamaica will not be hit as hard as it might have.
But this will still be devastating. The slow motion still means epic amounts of rain, on the order of 30″ in the mountains. There will be a lot of severe flooding in the many gullies (ravines) that pass through villages and urban areas all across the Island, and major wind damage along the swath damage – this track is bad for Montego Bay and Falmouth (on the north side) , but overall economic impacts look to be about half of what they did with the more easterly landfall that put the peak winds across Kingston, where, again, flooding will be a problem. Right now looking at about $6.5 Billion in damage, comparable to Gilbert (1988), That’s still about 33% of GDP – so “less” is still going to be “catastrophic”. For some perspective, this would be like a 9 Trillion dollar storm for the US – forty times the impact of Katrina.
Zooming out a bit, Cuba also looks to get hit pretty hard, at around $5 Billion in impacts. The Bahamas and Bermuda millions more, but that’s a ways off and depends on how much Jamaica and Cuba take out of the storm..
At this point we’re well within the uncertainty of the tracking and models, so unless something dramatic happens nothing to do but watch, and be prepared to help when the storm passes.
As always, thank you so much for all your hard work and making this an educational and reasonable presentation. Presenting the facts as known at this time, and not dramatizing is always so welcomed. Much appreciation.