ORLANDO, Fla. – Recon crews are carefully surveying Tropical Storm Melissa, and the critical observations they’re taking are being plugged into our high resolution hurricane forecast models.
The results are not too promising.
On satellite currently, Melissa is fending off vertical wind shear like a champ. The overnight maximum period, when tropical features usually thrive after the sun has set, really helped this system further organize.
Near to the center, thorough and deep convection is firing just about on all cylinders which indicates this storm is trying to strengthen.
Tuesday night when our late evening computer models started to populate, they produced their solutions with the help of reconnaissance data having been ingested.
This helps give the hurricane models especially a nudge in the accuracy department — they better capture what the current state of the storm is all about, the structure, internal dynamics at work and then naturally what’s going on in the local environment close to Melissa.
They show a promising trend for Haiti and Jamaica, however the caveat to that is Melissa attempts to explosively intensify into a Category 5 hurricane.
Computer models are also continuing to show a more westward track more than likely, as opposed to what the American GFS model has been depicting for the last several days. At this point, the one computer model is on an island by itself, with the remainder of our global low-resolution models and the high resolution hurricane models showing a greater chance this tracks west of Haiti and below Jamaica.
With Mother Nature, this reminds me of my FAVORITE analogy: it’s always a give and take.
While a westward track south will alleviate some of the rainfall totals that could pile up for Haiti and Jamaica, this just about guarantees Melissa will rapidly intensify into a catastrophic hurricane.
The focused rising motions we’re seeing in the central and southern Caribbean Sea would really help give this tropical storm a boost toward intensifying. The water temperatures both at the surface and below the surface of the sea have been untouched for over a year.
Typically with slow moving tropical features, we’d wait to see if it becomes “upwelled to death.” This term describes the process of mixing the once-warm surface waters below the core of the storm until cooler water from below comes up to the top.
You can’t fire tropical thunderstorms with cold water, so this typically begins a weakening phase for systems that linger for too long. In the case of our Caribbean Sea, the sub-surface thermal energy is on reserve and ready to rock regardless of upwelling.
Then comes the question of when the storm feels the influence of our next trough/cold front combo coming across the U.S. to be picked back up and swept east. This also suggests a possible major landfall somewhere from Cuba, the Cayman Islands, Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos/lower Bahamas.
For now, Florida is out of the bullseye.
I want to caution Floridians, especially Southern Floridian residents not take their foot off the gas just yet. We’ve been dealing with a VERY volatile steering set up. Wiggles, wobbles, shifts and nudges with the forecast track are going to continue, and some ensemble products still keep southern Florida as a potential area for future impacts.