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| Satellite image of Hurricane Melissa at landfall in Jamaica, preliminarily tied for the strongest landfall on record in the Atlantic. October 28 at 1700 UTC. |
Since my previous post on Monday when Melissa first reached Category 5 status, a lot happened on Tuesday (I was just too busy to write blog posts). It ended up maintaining that Category 5 intensity for 30 hours. This post will catch up from that and look ahead to an encounter with Bermuda later today.
Melissa made landfall on the southwest coast of Jamaica in the early afternoon hours of October 28 as an extremely powerful Category 5 hurricane -- by far the strongest landfalling hurricane in Jamaica's history. It then made a second landfall in eastern Cuba as a Category 3 hurricane, and then again in the central Bahamas as a Category 1 hurricane.
Very few tropical cyclones ever reach Category 5 intensity (157+ mph) -- roughly 3% in the Atlantic when averaged over the past century. But Melissa went far beyond that on Tuesday the 28th. It reached an exceptional 185 mph peak sustained wind speeds for several hours (at least preliminary... a post-season reanalysis will carefully scrutinize all available data and perhaps increase or decrease it). The central pressure at that time feel to 892 millibars, putting Melissa in the elite class of sub-900mb hurricanes -- there have only been seven of them known in the Atlantic now. The two tables below put these values into historical context (verified for accuracy from Wikipedia):
But what is more incredible and terrifying is that Melissa also made landfall at that intensity and pressure! Preliminarily, it is now TIED with the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane as the most intense landfalling storm ever in the Atlantic. Both the peak winds and the central pressure were the same (185 mph and 892 mb) so as of now there's no tiebreaker... this is definitely going to be a topic of extreme scrutiny and careful analysis during the post-season reanalysis period. Here are the same tables as above but just for landfall:
Unlike 1935 when there were no radar or satellite images, I have a very long radar loop of Melissa's historic approach to Jamaica from their radar in Kingston available at https://bmcnoldy.earth.miami.edu/tropics/radar/. The loop abruptly ends when either the radar itself was destroyed or communication was lost with it -- I don't know yet.
As of Thursday morning, Melissa is a re-intensifying Category 2 hurricane headed toward Bermuda. It could potentially have time to reach Category 3 status again before weakening and transitioning to an extratropical cyclone over the cold north-central Atlantic on Friday or Saturday. Its closest approach to Bermuda will be right around midnight tonight.
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One month remains in this exceptional hurricane season (THREE Category 5 hurricanes!). But as of the end of October, the season has had 13 named storms, including 5 hurricanes and 4 major hurricanes. Climatologically by the end of October those counts are 13, 6, and 3. This ratio of major hurricanes to named storms is an interesting one... a kind of "quality-over-quantity" index. Here is what that percentage looks like over the past fifty years, and note the average is 21%. This season is certainly on the high end so far at 31%; the only higher percentages during this period were in 2017, 2004, 1999, and 1996.
Looking at the Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), that is now up to 113% of average for the date, and is already higher than what a full average season has. If I include NHC's intensity forecasts for Melissa out to the end of the month, the ACE will be at 115% of average, and that's what I'm showing below:
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