cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/4556
“Category 6” hurricane with wind gusts up to 250 mph is set to bring flooding, landslides, and other life-threatening impacts.
Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday as a monstrous Category 5 storm as the island country braced for devastating impacts, humanitarian operations urgently mobilized, and experts voiced horror at the latest climate-fueled weather disaster.
“This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation,” the National Hurricane Center said in an update after the storm made landfall.
Early video footage posted to social media shows the storm—the most powerful to ever strike the island and the third-strongest to ever form in the Atlantic—wreaking havoc and destruction.
Anne-Claire Fontan, the World Meteorological Organization’s tropical cyclone specialist, told reporters that “a catastrophic situation is expected in Jamaica” and described the hurricane as “the storm of the century” for the island. Melissa’s landfall is expected to bring extreme flooding, landslides, and other life-threatening impacts.
Tens of thousands of Jamaicans lost power as the slow-moving storm approached the island, bringing torrential rain and maximum sustained winds of 185 mph, with gusts over 220 mph. Storms like Melissa are the reason scientists are pushing to formally add a Category 6 for hurricanes.
“Unimaginable violence is hiding in the very small and compact eyewall of Melissa,” said Greg Postel, hurricane specialist at The Weather Channel. “Nearly continuous lightning will accompany the tornadic wind speeds.”
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Those satellite images and it’s descriptions invoke a lovecraftian horror of scale and vertigo in me. We have the phrase “a perfect storm” and that’s the one.
“Unimaginable violence is hiding in the eyewall” is just straight up a Cthulhu description. And the exhausted hopeless scientists just ever and ever repeating, that yes, it’s our fault, we made it, we called it and if we keep burning the planet, more and bigger ones will come.
The horror is that those bigger ones are here, they just haven’t cohered yet out of the Earth system. We can certainly make it worse, and better, but…
I guess, culturally, it might have helped to have more stories where the demon-summoning is on a decades-long delay.
I live in hurricane alley. I’ve been watching the weather all hurricane season and it’s been mild-ish.
I’ve been through multiple, from Allen in the 1980s and up. My last was Harvey. I won’t do it again, and if this one comes within 200 miles of me I am taking my kids and high tailing it the fuck out of dodge.
That is a goddamned monster and it’s going to kill the poorest of us disproportionately. The rich will suffer and possibly die too, but not like Jamaicans, Cubans, and the global south at large.
If you live in this storm’s path, gtfo.
Mean winds of 216 mph
wind gust of 252 mph was just measured above the surface
that’s insane. i grew up and lived in a hurricane prone area and was in the path of 3 “major” hurricanes during the summer of '04, including a “strong category 4” on the Saffir-Simpson scale of 150 mph at it’s peak. it was legit crazy, so much infrastructure and housing was torn up in one night.
it was one of those formative events in my young adulthood which inserted the notion into my head that i would consider opportunities to relocate.
if that scale kept going with an average rank increase every 24mph (it jumps a lot) this would be like, a category 9 hurricane
i like the bit near the end where the guy who co-created the scale said there was no reason to go beyond Category 5, because it’s a scale of damage to human settlements and Category 5 is completely fucked already.
it’s like an EF4 (violent) tornado but the size of a large island. absolutely mind boggling.
yeah it’s straight line winds (which means structural stress spread evenly)
but there are shit loads of embedded mesovorticies which are sort of like the smaller suction vorticies in a tornado
these things are about the size of a tornado’s mesocyclone (and function in a similar way), except nearly entirely contacting the ground and adding rotational wind speed to parts of the eye wall
I’ve seen the videos from inside the eye and it’s insane. What can you even do if you can’t evacuate other than just die?
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Fuck
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