NeonPeon

It's a good thing this thing just simply doesn't have much time to work with. The rate at which it recovered intensity is impressive.

Japan, Portugal, Poland, Croatia... the list goes on and on. Plenty of places have declining population. Even American holdings like Puerto Rico.

The track certainly could have been worse, if the intensity actually could not have been any worse. The other thing jamaica escaped was the stall and turn to the north occurring close enough to cause a longer duration heavy rain event. For a time 40+ inches were on the table in the east.

A little worse for wear too after she ran through Jamaica?

Straight line winds.

Right, but it was unremarkably strong at landfall.

It looks rather like the eye is oscillating within the storm. The bulk of the storm is still making eastward progress.

The overarching story there is "we are contributorily negligent." This thing was well forecast.

Many will do, as this was very well forecasted.

What has always fascinated me about hurricanes is the combination of unbelievable strength and fragility. This one was sure to be devastating when land falling but on several occasions I thought it was definitely going to at least temporarily weaken slightly and instead several times it has actually just deepened. The long loop of this hurricane is a meandering buzzsaw.

Sure, but it's better than it hitting the eastern side of the island at least, both in terms of landslide risks and the population. Tourist areas also will rebuild, while no one will invest funds to address the abject destruction of slums in and around kingston.

The trough is also moving into influence which can begin to affect symmetry and convection on the periphery of the TC, including the outflow channela. Otherwise, Melissa's core is about as textbook as it gets for a powerful Atlantic Caribbean hurricane. Current appearance kind of reminds me of Matthew. I think it's more the latter, yeah you can see part of the outflow racing off to the northeast. As the whole storm turns it'll reorient, but if the coastal interaction happens before it can wrap the convection around more, I don't see how it isn't currently at around its peak strength, which is impressive enough.

It's already at 160mph. It's some ask for it to rapidly intensity from there! Esp when it is looking less symmetrical.

First appearance of any asymmetry in a while on ir. Deeper convection away from eyewall in ne quadrant. Imagining this is an ewr beginning? Hopefully it can't finish before becoming a slightly larger windfield version of the same beast we just saw.

I think my total rainfall in may will exceed my total snowfall for the season.