gallopinggertie

Fung-Wong just made landfall in central Luzon as a 115-mph typhoon, very large storm too. It’s forecast to move across Luzon at a good clip, so hopefully doesn’t cause too many flooding problems.

Impacts to southern Cuba sound pretty bad. ”In Guantánamo, Santiago, and other eastern communities, homes were damaged, essential services were disrupted, and nearly 450,000 people temporarily lost access to safe water. The provinces of Santiago de Cuba, Granma and Holguín have no electricity. To date, damage has been detected in 44 health and education institutions. Classes remain suspended in the eastern provinces. Several community food distribution centers were lost, and many people lost their fishing boats, livestock, and other means of subsistence. Recovery has progressed, but shortages and fragile infrastructure persist, worsening the impacts of Hurricane Melissa in these areas.” https://reliefweb.int/report/cuba/emergency-appeal-cuba-hurricane-melissa-mdrcu013

Preliminary damage estimates are $7.7 billion in Jamaica, which would be more than a third of their annual GDP. I’m sure we will see that number change a lot, but still.

Jesus…that footage is jaw dropping. Thank god Melissa didn’t hit Kingston, of course that’s small consolation for people living where it did hit.

Any thoughts on surge threat for Santiago de Cuba? I looked the city up on Google street view, there are some photo spheres showing that part of the colonial heart is just a few feet above the bay there.

The good news for Cuba is the forecast has shifted west, the NHC track now shows a landfall about 55 miles west of Santiago de Cuba, on a stretch of coast where hardly anyone lives.

The population there is a lot more concentrated in a single city than western Jamaica. You have one big city, Santiago de Cuba, with half a million people - and hardly anyone at all lives on the coast west of there. Right now the NHC tracks Melissa what looks to be 30 or so miles west of the city. Hopefully they escape the worst winds and surge. They are on a kind of estuary/bay so I’m worried it is surge prone.

That’s the thing, in the video he said that in fact homes in jamaica are often built a good bit above the river anyway. The threat (according to him) is moreso landslides/rockslides caused by huge amounts of rain falling on crumbling and steep terrain, rather than houses getting swept away by the water itself.

Not sure about this. In the geology video I linked to, the geologist actually compares Jamaica during Melissa to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Helene…and he says that this situation is actually worse. Jamaica’s river valleys are more prone to landslides because the rock is actively being uplifted by a fault, making the rocky slopes steeper and more fragile/prone to crumbling. The rock itself collapses - versus in the Blue Ridge, the slides are soil and debris, the underlying rock itself doesn’t slide away. Also he says that the rivers in Jamaica are really large in terms of flow, despite not being very long.

Yeah there are a couple hundred thousand people in that area (a few times less than around Kingston). It could easily be their worst hurricane in the modern era. https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/

Yep. Although it will still be quite bad in Montego Bay, which is the second largest city, the worst case would have been a landfall at Kingston.

This geology channel made a great (and sobering) video about why Jamaica is so prone to landslides. https://youtu.be/QQ4a_01mGQY?si=lUQZ_YOcv_WZ5gLo

Looks like Phoenix’ Sky Harbor airport picked up 1.7” overnight and this morning. El Paso got over an inch last night. Salt Lake City also recently had one of their wettest days on record, and Las Vegas got 0.90” in thunderstorms a few days ago. So most of the major metro areas in the desert SW and Great Basin are lucking out lately on rainfall - with the exception of Tucson, which is still way below normal for the year to date.

Japan really lucking out with Typhoon Halong’s forecast track:

Yes, and unfortunately the mechanism of greenhouse gases isn’t something that alarms most people in the same way that acid rain or ozone depletion does. It seems like to get people to care about a threat that’s larger than them, it usually has to connect with them on an instinctive, gut level. So there’s that, even aside from our difficulty with this kind of long-term thinking, that makes the problem so hard to address as a group.

Typhoon Neoguri is a fully tropical 120-mph cyclone way to the east of northern Japan, at 38N/167.3N. SST’s in this area are up to 4C above normal. I’m not sure exactly what the records are for this area of ocean, but I can’t remember any typhoons reaching this far northeast without becoming extratropical. You can see how the northernmost outflow is barely touching the southernmost Aleutians, which I’ve definitely never seen before.

Not sure what intensity exactly Ragasa was at when it made landfall. Maybe a low-end Cat 3? According to Wikipedia, the Chinese coast saw impressively high wind speeds/gusts: ”At 12:00 CST on September 24 the coastal city of Jiangmen experienced its highest wind speed ever recorded at 67 m/s (220 ft/s), equivalent to 241 km/h (150 mph).”

Typhoon Ragasa looking powerful on satellite as it passes just south of Hong Kong.

He came back from the dead! I love when the NHC has a sense of humor lol

The North Pacific and Arctic are on fire. I find the giant area of 5C+ anomalies in the Kara Sea particularly unsettling. I’m not sure what marine ecosystems live up there, but I have a feeling that they’re probably in turmoil right now. The Sea of Japan is also scorching, which makes sense because Japan just had its warmest summer on record by a comfortable margin - 2.36C above average for the whole country above the 1990-2020 averages! That’s hard to fathom. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2025/9/1/japan-and-south-korea-record-hottest-summers-in-history

It will almost definitely be too late, yeah. The current extinction rate of species is like 100 times above the typical background rate because of human activity (and honestly, climate change is just the tip of the iceberg). On some level, we like to think we’re separate from the rest of nature, but of course we aren’t…

Exactly this. We already are seeing events that are clearly tied to climate change. It might be even more useful to look at major ecological events than individual weather events - things like coral bleaching events, mass kelp forest dieoffs, and the recent unprecedented sargassum blooms in the Atlantic. (All due at least in part to rising SST’s in the world’s oceans). These are signs of shifting baselines that majorly effect which organisms and ecosystems thrive in a given place. And to be honest, I don’t have much patience for those who can see stuff like that happening and not make the connection to rapid climate change.

I saw that. It also sounds like there’s at least an outside chance of a TS landfall on the east side of the big island.

Hopefully tropical storm Lorena brings some rain to the desert southwest, most of that area is still in at least severe drought (D2).