Hurricane Melissa strengthened Tuesday as it crawled toward Jamaica, where officials and residents braced for catastrophic winds, flash flooding and landslides.
01:00This has been a rapid intensification hurricane.
01:13So it developed as a tropical storm in the Caribbean Sea and then it's tracked across
01:20the basin over the last few days, I think.
01:24And then what happened was it picked up a lot of energy from warmer sea surface temperatures
01:31and developed into a storm system.
01:34We call this a rapid intensification hurricane because of how fast the wind speeds developed
01:40over a really short period.
01:42And also we can see this because of how slow the storm is moving.
01:46So the wind speeds are topping 175 miles per hour.
01:51It's also the strongest storm that we've seen globally this year.
01:55So it's of massive concern, but it's slightly different dynamics to a normal hurricane in
02:02the fact that it's picked up all of this energy from warmer sea surface temperatures and then
02:08is releasing this energy in higher wind speeds and also intense rainfall.
02:13So it's a little bit more.
02:14So I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of control.
02:20So, let's go.
02:50I think they are very well prepared.
03:01I think that the issue potentially was how soon they had to put this in place.
03:07So, it was very quickly that this storm intensified and therefore the early warning window for these countries was very small in the matter of two days.
03:20I think because usually with these storms what you'd expect is that it would veer north of Jamaica and so it's very rare for it to track directly across Jamaica.
03:30So, that might have caused an issue as well.
03:34But they are doing everything they can to prepare people for the storm, issuing evacuations.
03:40They've got all of the aid that they can available to issue to people after the storm.
03:44And I think they're doing everything they really can to prepare for such a big storm, such a drastically impactful form hitting the very centre of their country.
03:58so, that's two hours of warning.
04:00So, here we go.
04:01So, this is one of the worst things we have to do here.
04:03So, this is the worst thing that's been happening to you.
04:06So, this is a huge job that's about finding people in our country.
04:07It's a huge job that they can't believe in, it's a huge job.
04:10This is a huge job that they can't believe in.
04:11So, this is the human being.
04:12They can't believe that they can't believe in this job.
04:13So, you know what they can?
04:14We're going to have a new family.
04:44We're increasingly seeing these rapid intensification storms. It's not just the case in the Caribbean
05:12Sea or the Atlantic. We usually see them in sort of the Pacific or Indian Ocean sort of region of
05:19cyclones and typhoons around Christmas time actually. So it's actually quite unusual to see
05:25the same dynamic in the Caribbean Sea. This is more likely with climate change and therefore
05:31we should be concerned because all of these regions where we see hurricanes are more likely
05:36to see these sort of storms in the future. It also could be possible that we could get even more
05:42intense storms and that should be something that we're thinking about preparing communities for.
05:48This is the strongest storm this year but in the future it could be one of a number of storms of
05:54this strength that we see within a year and that's really concerning.
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