ICYMI: Hurricane Melissa Is Set To Make Landfall In Jamaica

0:07You're listening to the 1A Podcast. I'm Jen White, and this is In Case You Missed It, where we bring you some of the week's most important conversations you might have missed. Today, we check in on Hurricane Melissa. It's on track to make a direct hit on Jamaica Today, with rains and winds already lashing the island. It's the strongest storm on the planet this year and one of the most devastating on record. Authorities in Jamaica and Cuba have issued evacuation orders for tens of thousands of people. Bernadette Woods Plackey joins us after the break from New Jersey to talk about this historic storm.

0:41She's the chief meteorologist at Climate Central. That's an independent nonprofit researching and reporting on facts of our changing climate. And remember, this story is rapidly developing and things may change by the time you hear this podcast. So for all the latest, be sure to visit npr.org and tune into your local member station. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

1:06Welcome to the program, Bernadette. Well, thank you for having me. So, Melissa, it's a Category 5 storm with sustained winds up to now 180 miles per hour. Help us understand just how big this storm is. Well, I actually have to update you because as we're speaking, there's been a new update. And it's now, sadly, up to 185 miles per hour. This is one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic. So give us some perspective, because I think if you've never lived through a hurricane, especially a large one, how does Melissa compare to hurricanes that have hit the region in the past? Well, there are a few different ways to look at this context.

1:51We're talking about it over open water when we rank our storms. We can do that by wind speed or by central pressure. And that may sound a little technical, but they're tightly connected. So the lower the central pressure goes, the higher the wind speeds usually go. And this storm continues to drop its pressure, which is why the wind speeds continue to go up. At this point, it's 892 millibars. And I'm saying that because that would put it third strongest on record for the entire Atlantic Basin for anything that's been recorded in human history. Now, that's one way to look at it. What speed it has at landfall is another way because that's where we're going to feel the most damage.

2:34And that's where the human component comes in. And sadly, with this storm, it is still intensifying and it is so close to making landfall. So we don't see this storm breaking up in any way. And it will be one of the strongest storms ever to make landfall in the Atlantic. Melissa was expected to make landfall in Jamaica by early this morning, but the storm slowed down. What does the speed at which it's moving mean for the size and intensity of the storm? Well, one of the reasons the slow speed is really not good in this situation is it has that much more time to do damage over the land. What was happening, and the reason it's been moving so slowly, it was in general our storms in the Atlantic drift off to the west and northwest.

3:19And that was happening, but then as they encounter our weather patterns that we see usually on the continental United States, that drives and steers the storms. And there is a storm moving along the east coast of the United States, which is why Melissa has made its turn from the west around to the north-northeast. And that's why it's slowed down, because it's interacting with those weather patterns. Now that it has made the turn, it is eventually going to pick up speed and race off to the northeast, but this slow speed just offshore means that it's allowing more water to pile up. It's also pummeling land, not just Jamaica, but it is such a wide storm, so large in size too, not just intensity, that these rain bands are extending out over many different islands.

4:06And the slower it moves, the more rain can fall. And the slower it moves with this kind of a wind speed intensity, not forward speed, just to kind of differentiate the two, it allows that much more time for it to really do damage and eat up the land. So when is it expected to hit Jamaica now? Do we have a good estimate? It's coming in the next hour or so. It's happening this morning, late morning, and then it will start to pick up some speed and move off to the northeast. It is so strong that even after it makes its way over land, it's still going to be a major hurricane when it passes over Cuba.

4:47and as the bands continue to spread out far from the center of this, it's already doing a lot of damage for Haiti, Dominican Republic, and a lot of the other islands in its path. And when we talk about winds of 170, 180, 185, what does it mean for structures on the island? Is anything able to stand up to that level of wind speed? This is a great question. We are going to see what does and does not. But when you're talking about 185 miles per hour, very few things are built to withstand that. There have been some recent building codes that have updated standards in parts of Florida. And the other thing, too, is there are a couple of areas that have popped up with more climate resilient home buildings, some hurricane proofing that there are a handful, just very isolated houses in Florida and other parts of the Gulf Coast region.

5:43There's even an area called Babcock Ranch, which built in Florida, that is trying to up its building codes and its capacity to withstand higher winds. But 185 is toward the top limit of whatever's been experienced. So it's going to push all standards. Jamaica's landscape is varied. So there are beaches, there are hillsides, there are mountains. How will different parts of the island feel the effects of this storm differently? That's a great question. I'll take you down not just by topography, but also east to west. So when you look at a hurricane, you sort of can cut a line down the center of it from the direction that it's going.

6:25And you would say north to south. But if this is moving off to the east, it kind of tilt that line a little bit. Point is, on the eastern side of that line, that's where the worst is. The winds are coming up from the south. The water is piling up even higher for a higher storm surge. And so on the eastern side of that axis, that line that we're talking about, is where we're going to get the most damage. And that is going to happen on the eastern side of this island because it looks like the landfall will be on the western part of Jamaica. Now, the other way to look at this is through the different topographies, as you were saying.

7:03A flat land and along the coast, especially the southern shore, is not only going to get the rain and the intense winds, but the storm surge. And we're talking a storm surge that could be up to a foot. So that's when the water really piles up and pushes high and inland. And in a warming planet, we're seeing higher and stronger storm surges because of sea level rise. So that's going to be another way that the coasts are going to experience this. Then when you go inland, there's some high mountains in Jamaica. And what happens in mountains, and anyone listening who's spent some time in the mountains during a rainstorm understands this, is that it funnels the rain and then it increases its speed downhill.

7:46And that's why you see often flash flooding in some of the canyons out west of the United States when you do get these rainstorms. Well, there are high mountains in Jamaica that will funnel this rain and accelerate it even more on top of just the intensity they're going to experience. And that is another sign of climate change is we're getting more heavy rainfall in all of our storms because a warmer atmosphere can actually hold more water. And then you talk about the winds, right? So the core, the center of the storm right around the eye wall. Now, this is what we talk about, the eye of the storm.

8:23is where it's actually quiet and just around the edge of it is where the most intense winds are going to be. And what we're talking about with 185 miles per hour, that will be around the eye wall. The other thing though, too, is you go up in height and with high mountains, you do go up in height, the winds do increase. So there could be wind gusts over 200 miles per hour if it does tap into one of those mountain regions. You mentioned sea level rise. And I'm curious to hear more about how that's playing into what will happen along the coast of Jamaica and what it means for flooding in those areas.

9:03Yeah, so a storm like this is going to produce a lot of its own flooding regardless. It is just such a massive high-intensity storm. The way that climate change is playing into a storm like this, which also plays into the sea level rise and the storm surge, is that when we talk about trapping the extra heat in our Earth system, over 90 % of that heat is going into our oceans. So our oceans are warming up even faster than our air is. And when you have warmer water, as we're seeing in this case, and our oceans in general have been pushing at record highs for the past couple of years, quite honestly.

9:39But when you have that extra warm water, it can really intensify storms more rapidly, which is what we're seeing more of and we saw in this case. And on top of it, we see sea level rise. And that's even outside of storms that we're seeing the seas rise with warmer water. It's melting ice, but it's also expanding our oceans. So when you have sea level rise on top of a storm surge, it just pushes it that much higher and that much farther inland. Briefly, Bernadette, what are the immediate needs in the aftermath of a storm this massive? This is going to be a really tough one. The immediate needs are to keep people healthy and safe.

10:19And Jamaica has been doing all it can to set up for that. Clean water, food, a safe place to stay, medical emergencies. There's going to be a lot of medical assistance needed. So those are the absolute immediate. But we're also going to need communication as we start to repair. That's Bernadette Woods-Plackey. She's Chief Meteorologist at Climate Central. Bernadette, thank you. Thank you. To stay up to date with all the latest on this developing story, be sure to visit npr.org and tune into your local member station. This program comes to you from WAMU, part of American University in Washington, distributed by NPR.

10:58I'm Jen White. Thanks for listening. And let's talk more soon. This is 1A.