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  • Current Tropical Systems
    Melissa

Hurricane Melissa

tornado examiner said:
So They’ll be looking at the data for a potential further upgrade to pre-landfall intensity?
Wow.
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It's the same thing they did with Michael and Andrew as well. Those are the only two that come to mind
 
tornado examiner said:
So They’ll be looking at the data for a potential further upgrade to pre-landfall intensity?
Wow.
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To me, it more reads like "This storm was very powerful, but we will need to verify everything before saying if it beat storm X, Y, or Z." Basically, they want to cross their Ts and dot their Is. It might end up being "upgraded," but "downgraded" could be a possibility, too. Basically, be patient for additional study of the storm before trying to set its stats in stone. Regardless of where it ends up in rankings, it still made landfall as an extremely powerful storm.
 
ColdFront said:
I’ve been following this thread since Melissa formed but not posting, I’m just not that versed in tropical systems. While I’m absolutely a tornado guy, and it’s been said ad nauseam already, we are witnessing something historic.

what would be the closest comparison to this in a tornado event?
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4/3/1974, 4/27/2011, this is literally the hurricane equivalent to a super outbreak.
 
Grand Poo Bah said:
Seeing the winds in Montego Bay, it's hard to comprehend what the winds were like near the eye wall when Melissa made landfall. Unreal.

These were the last correspondences from Josh Morgerman before the eyewall was even over him.





It's a little concerning we haven't heard anything else from him by now.
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I'm sure he's fine. It may be a few days before we hear from him. It probably depends on the condition of the airports. I think there are two major airports on the island, plus other smaller landing strips. Sangster might be down a few days, but Fleming is on the eastern side of the island. The question would be how long it would take for him to get there.

I think it might have been Maria that hit Puerto Rico where we went about a week before we heard from him.
 
Grand Poo Bah said:
Is it possible the mountains helped channel warm ocean air into the eye, and that's why it maintained its strength for so long? There are numerous stories of mountain slopes rapidly intensifying tornadoes, so I'm wondering if those same dynamics could've been at play here.
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There was just so much warm ocean air to begin with that I expect it will be hard to know. The depth of the warm water was just unprecedented - and it had remained virtually unstirred for a lot longer than usual. Orographic lift and any channeling effect would have been after it turned north, and there's no doubt that the eastern side "blobs" fired off heavily right as it did that. I wondered at the time if maybe there was some channeling going there, as it looked like a convection traffic jam. I expect there's a lot that will be studied about Melissa for years to come.
 
tornado examiner said:
Yeah it's being spread around the internet of course, debris high up in the air. Drone footage. None of the buildings line up at all. Lmfao. Somehow numerous are falling for it, we’re a goner species.
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Text to image generation models are like only 2 years old and already hard to distinguish from reality. Don’t kid yourself - in 6-12 months, they will be fooling everyone including you and me
 
Blountwolf said:
There was just so much warm ocean air to begin with that I expect it will be hard to know. The depth of the warm water was just unprecedented - and it had remained virtually unstirred for a lot longer than usual. Orographic lift and any channeling effect would have been after it turned north, and there's no doubt that the eastern side "blobs" fired off heavily right as it did that. I wondered at the time if maybe there was some channeling going there, as it looked like a convection traffic jam. I expect there's a lot that will be studied about Melissa for years to come.
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Bingo. The warm uninterrupted water.
 
slenker said:
I was under the impression that Andrew had damage in the EF3 range. In another thread, if anyone has any instances of Andrew’s damage pointing to EF4 or higher intensity, I’d love to be proven wrong here.
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Late reply but I had to respond. This is a misconception I held for a long time until I dug deeper. Once you get to the very top of the Saffir-Simpson scale, you actually do start to see damage comparable to a violent tornado, albeit usually in isolated spots.

Andrew - Damage in the Naranja area was comparable to low end F4, including flattened one story condominium buildings.

Michael - Borderline violent damage including debarked trees and leveled buildings in the eastern fringes of the Panama City metro and at Tyndall AFB.

Irma - Debarked trees, severe damage to concrete buildings, and leveled homes were documented in the most violent parts of the eyewall in the Caribbean.

Dorian - Most violent hurricane eyeball damage I have ever seen. Anchor bolted homes in the Bahamas were leveled or slabbed far inland away from the storm surge. Entire forests were shredded and partially debarked. Large heavy objects like shipping containers were thrown.

I don’t have the patience to go back and dig all this up, but there are some photos posted by myself and others somewhere on a tropical events thread showing some of these instances of damage. In any case, I imagine we’ll see some damage from Melissa comparable to what I just described.
 
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