For those visiting from links in news articles about climate change, here’s a few thoughts on that subject (link).
Melissa is now rapidly moving northeast, and has made landfall on the southeast coast of Cuba along the Sierra Maestra coastline west of Santiago de Cuba. Here are the links to NHC’s Key messages regarding Hurricane Melissa (en Español: Mensajes Claves). The sun isn’t up yet over the storm, here is the IR view over the last few hours:
Using my TAOS(tm)/Lachesis economic impact model, here is what NHC’s forecast looks like:
On this track, there are 3.5 million people in the damage swath in Cuba, with 1.7 million of them expected to experience hurricane conditions. Economic impacts are hard to measure in Cuba, given the nature of the command economy, but impacts are likely in the 8 to 10% of GDP range. Although they have fluctuated over the years, there are still extensive sanctions and restrictions on Cuba, with President Trump expanding them this June. While in the past the U.S. has issued waivers for assistance after hurricanes, it remains to be seen what if anything the present administration will do.
The Guantanamo Naval Base is probably right at borderline hurricane conditions, perhaps a bit less, so there will be damage, especially to exposed infrastructure.
Next up later today will be the southern and central Bahamas. This track avoids most of the major islands, and given the still relatively small size of the storm, the impacts should be limited, although there are several thousand people on the Inagua Islands, Crooked Island, the south end of Long Island, and Abrahams Cay that could get hit hard. As with many events, the small numbers in terms of economic impact won’t reflect the damage and suffering of those hit.
After that, it looks like Bermuda may get side-swiped, there is a hurricane watch up. Nova Scotia and Vinland (called Newfoundland by some) might catch some fringes. Tracking is pretty tight, note that Google’s “deep mind” AI lost it’s first place ranging in the score box to the European Ensemble and ECM primary models due to consistency and the 5 day error radius, if you obsess over that sort of thing …
Today we will start to get a more complete picture of the impact the storm had on Jamaica. The western end of the Island was likely devastated, as well as much the interior even in the east due to flooding. Essentially all of the island’s 2.9 million people experienced tropical storm conditions or greater, The models are estimating economic impacts at between $6 and $10 Billion dollars, the range is due to the uncertainty in flooding. The total is likely around $7.7 Billion, or around 40% of GDP, an incredible amount of impact that will take at least a decade to recover from.
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