Hurricane Melissa brought hurricane-force gusts to Bermuda overnight, the Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center said Friday. The storm brought heavy rains and winds to the Bahamas Thursday after slamming eastern Cuba and Jamaica earlier in the week.
A hurricane warning for Bermuda has now been discontinued.
Melissa was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin when it reached Jamaica Tuesday afternoon as a Category 5 storm. The 13th named storm of the Atlantic season didn’t have any direct impact on the U.S. mainland.
Melissa’s forecast and path
The storm’s wind speeds dropped after its landfalls over Jamaica and Cuba, and its winds had weakened further to 90 mph when the hurricane center issued its 2 a.m. EDT advisory Friday. That made Melissa a Category 1, the lowest on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Melissa still had 90 mph winds three hours later.
By that time, the NHC said, Melissa’s core was about 255 miles north of Bermuda and it was hurrying northeast at 41 mph through the Atlantic’s cooler waters.
Nikki Nolan / CBS News 
The storm is expected to pass to the south of Newfoundland, Canada, as a post-tropical cyclone and continue to weaken over the weekend.
High swells generated by Melissa will continue to affect portions of Hispaniola (the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti), Cuba, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Bermuda during the next couple of days, and will also reach the Northeast U.S. coast. The hurricane center warns of the risk of “life-threatening surf and rip current conditions.”
Climate change has been fueling the storm
Above-average Atlantic Ocean temperatures, made worse by climate change, helped Melissa rapidly intensify into a major hurricane, according to climate scientists.
“That part of the Atlantic is extremely warm right now — around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), which is 2 to 3 degrees Celsius above normal,” Akshay Deoras, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in the U.K., told The Associated Press. “And it’s not just the surface. The deeper layers of the ocean are also unusually warm, providing a vast reservoir of energy for the storm.”
Stronger winds, heavier rainfall and higher sea level rise make storm surge more intense.
Preliminary data from Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists monitoring the effects of climate change, suggests that climate change increased Melissa’s wind speed by 10 mph.
“Climate change is fundamentally changing our weather. It does not mean that every single tropical cyclone is going to go through rapid or super-rapid intensification. However, in our warmer world, it will continue to increase the likelihood of storms going through rapid and super-rapid intensification,” Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central, told the AP.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: cbsnews.com
