AccuWeather forecasters are warning that the western Caribbean could face extreme impacts from Tropical Storm Melissa as the storm will barely move for nearly a week.
00:00So we're looking at tropical storm Melissa. Melissa is strengthening and we've already seen a few flood reports even in Puerto Rico well to the east of the storm from last night.
00:09A couple of cases with flooding along roads 1010 last night.
00:13There you can see in some spots southwestern parts of Puerto Rico there as well.
00:18This is off to the west of Salinas and Santa Isabel and south of Mayaguez.
00:23Now as we take a look at the rain right now, this is the footprint of the rain.
00:27Very heavy rain in eastern parts of Santo Domingo.
00:30And we're going to see an increasing problem into Haiti.
00:33So Haiti, the west side of the Dominican Republic, or the west side of Hispaniola and the Dominican Republic is the east side there.
00:41And we have huge concerns about the flooding there in Hispaniola and into Jamaica eventually.
00:46So let's get into it. Here we have the latest on Melissa.
00:49Moving west at 15 miles per hour.
00:51That westward movement is pretty swift right now.
00:53It's not going to continue at that pace though for long.
00:56So our concern is that it's going to really slow as it moves farther west and northwest.
01:01There is some wind shear keeping it in check right now.
01:03We'll look at that in a little bit with the forecast feed at 45 minutes after the hour.
01:07But you'll notice the 15 mile per hour westward movement is not going to be the case long.
01:12From 8 p.m. Thursday to 8 p.m. Monday, we're forecasting almost, well I don't want to say no, but very limited movement here over multiple days.
01:21And the whole time, strong flow from the south is going to drive flooding rainfall into parts of Haiti.
01:27We are looking at gusts of wind 80 to 100 miles per hour in Kingston, Jamaica.
01:31Look at the DR.
01:32They've already seen some very heavy rain in Santo Domingo today from this system.
01:36And Santo Domingo likely to see 8 to 12 inches of rain.
01:39But much of southern parts of Haiti could see 12 to 18 inches of rain.
01:46With our AccuWeather local storm acts of up to 30 inches of rain.
01:49We have some tremendously high elevations here in Haiti.
01:52Some elevations, the highest in the nation is 8,700 feet.
01:55That's way, way higher.
01:57That's 2,500 feet higher than Mount Washington, New Hampshire.
02:01So huge problems.
02:02This storm will have an AccuWeather real impact scale rating of 4 for Haiti, the southwestern Dominican Republic, and parts of at least eastern Jamaica.
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