As Hurricane Melissa made landfall, a daring team of aviators flew straight into the eye of the monstrous Category 5 storm.
On Monday, a US Air Force reserve crew from the 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, nicknamed the “Hurricane Hunters,” shared videos and images of their flight inside the cyclone to collect vital weather data.
The stunning imagery depicts the almost unearthly serenity at the eye of the cyclone, as well as the epic “stadium effect” created by the towering wall of clouds that enclose it. Though this “eyewall,” as meteorologists call it, appears to be moving slowly, the ringed region is in reality brimming with the storm’s most vicious winds. Another set of breathtaking photos taken by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite look straight down into the eye at the height of its powers.
These winds proved a little too much for even the seasoned crew of the Hurricane Hunters, who filmed some of the flight’s rockiest moments. Midway through their Monday expedition, the team turned around early and returned to its base in Curaçao due to severe turbulence, the National Hurricane Center said, per ABC News. On a follow-up flight the next day, the team was once again battered by extreme turbulence and forced to make an early return.
“My first time ever in a Category 5, and it was definitely the most turbulent I’ve ever experienced,” Andy Hazelton, a scientist at the University of Miami on the flight, tweeted after the Monday expedition.
Hurricane Melissa, at some ten miles in diameter, is one of the most powerful Atlantic storms to make landfall on record. As it bore down on Jamaica on Tuesday, it reached sustained wind speeds of 185 miles per hour and gusts that reached 215 mph, sowing destruction across the island nation that still hasn’t been fully accounted for.
The Jamaican government declared the country a disaster area, with at least one parish said to be “under water” and 15,000 people in government shelters, according to the New York Times, citing officials. In Haiti, where the hurricane did not make landfall but still blasted it with heavy rain, at least 25 people were killed after a flooded river burst its banks, CNN reported.
Melissa has slowed down to a Category 2 storm and is now heaving itself across Cuba, where hundreds of thousands of people have evacuated from areas expected to bear the worst of the hurricane’s beatings. After it moves on from Cuba, it’s projected to close in on the Bahamas.
Not only is Melissa extremely powerful, but it also appears to have a somewhat unusual structure at its center: the eyewall didn’t quite exhibit the “classic” stadium effect where the clouds are more sloped like the seats in an arena, Hazelton observed in another post. Instead, it was more vertically cylindrical.
Michael Lowry, a hurricane specialist for ABC’s WPLG-TV, believes there could be some relationship between the storm’s structure and why Melissa was one of the longest-lived Category 5 storms on record.
“Most major (Category 3 or stronger) hurricanes undergo at least one eyewall replacement cycle during their lifetimes — especially high-end Category 4 and 5 hurricanes like Melissa — that physically alters the character and structure of the hurricane, usually forcing winds to at least temporarily weaken,” Lowry wrote on his Substack.
“Based on all available real-time data, Melissa never formed a secondary eyewall — an outer ring of strong storms — that could start the eyewall replacement process and starve its inner core of life-sustaining inflow, countering its intensification.”
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