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Two years ago, in August 2015, Tropical Storm Erika hit Dominica, killing 31 people and destroying more than 370 homes. Many towns were cut off as roads were blocked and power was lost in what was at that point the most devastating storm to lash Dominica since Hurricane David in 1979.

Erika had wind speeds of a maximum 50mph (85kmh) – much less than Maria’s 160mph (260kmh).

In 2015, prime minister Roosevelt Skerrit said damage from Erika could set the island’s development back two decades.

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Guadeloupe – the bridgehead for aid for Irma-hit French territories – ordered all residents to take shelter in a maximum-level “violet alert” effective from 8pm local time as powerful rains drenched the French Caribbean island.

St Kitts and Nevis, the British island of Montserrat, and the islands of Culebra and Vieques were also on alert.

On Martinique, which is also part of France, energy supplier EDF said power had been cut off from 16,000 homes, although a hurricane warning on that island was later downgraded to a tropical storm.

In rain-lashed St Lucia, which also faced a tropical storm warning, flooding, mudslides and power outages were reported in parts of the island.

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Dominica’s DBS radio station had been broadcasting news as the hurricane swirled across the island, reporting damage to the roof of the Princess Margaret hospital in the capital, Roseau.

Shortly after reporting that something had crashed into the station building, DBS has now gone quiet.

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“Maria is developing the dreaded pinhole eye,” the center warned.

That’s a sign of an extremely strong hurricane likely to get even mightier, said University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy. Just like when a spinning ice skater brings in their arms and rotates faster, a smaller, tighter eye shows the same physics, he said.

Maria’s eye shrank to a narrow 10 miles (16km) across. “You just don’t see those in weaker hurricanes,” McNoldy said.

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Slynx zei:

't ziet er daar m.i. alleszins niet goed uit. Benieuwd of die eilanden dat nog te boven gaan komen, gezien daar zo van het toerisme geleefd wordt ...

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Additional hurricanes, beyond that of Jose and Maria, are likely over the Atlantic and may threaten the United States for the rest of the 2017 season.
Hurricane season runs through the end of November, and it is possible the Atlantic may continue to produce tropical storms right up to the wire and perhaps into December.
"I think we will have four more named storms this year, after Maria," according to AccuWeather Hurricane Expert Dan Kottlowski.
"Of these, three may be hurricanes and one may be a major hurricane," Kottlowski said.
The numbers include the risk of one to two additional landfalls in the United States.

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On average, strong west to northwest winds with cooler and drier air tend to scour tropical systems out of the western Atlantic during October and November.
However, this year, AccuWeather meteorologists are concerned that these winds may not occur until later in the autumn or may be too weak to steer tropical threats away from the U.S.

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But DeMaria said that this season is seeing more rapid intensification events than usual and that Maria, in particular, appears to have set a key record for hurricane rapid intensification in the Atlantic.

“Looking back through the records, Maria went from a tropical depression to a Category 5 hurricane in just two and a half days,” he said. “I couldn’t find any other tropical cyclones in our historical record that went that quickly from a depression to a Category 5 hurricane.”

That’s a big problem, because rapid intensification sets the stage for worst-case scenarios. Sadly, that’s what happened to the Caribbean island of Dominica on Monday night, hit by Maria at full Category 5 strength.

There’s little chance to warn people or for them to prepare if rapid intensification occurs, so forecasters naturally want to be able to have a handle on it — but it’s a struggle.

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The National Hurricane Center technically defines rapid intensification as a wind speed increase of at least 35 miles per hour in 24 hours. All four of the most intense Atlantic storms in 2017 beat that easily:

On the evening of Aug. 24, a day before landfall, Harvey was a Category 1 hurricane with 85-mile-per hour winds. Twenty-four hours later, at landfall in Texas, the storm was a Category 4 with 130-mile-per-hour winds.
At 11 a.m. on Monday, Sept. 4, Hurricane Irma was already a strong Category 3 storm with 120-mile-per-hour winds. But Irma then radically strengthened further, becoming a superpowered upper-end Category 5 storm with 180-mile-per-hour winds in just 24 hours.
Following behind Irma in the middle of the day on Sept. 7, Hurricane Jose was a Category 1 storm with 90-mile-per-hour winds. Twenty-four hours later, it was rated a high-end Category 4 with 150-mile-per-hour winds.
Beven’s “pinhole eye” language came as Hurricane Maria reached Category 4 intensity, despite having been a Category 1 just 12 hours earlier. But Maria wasn’t done. The storm would leap further to Category 5 strength, ultimately increasing in intensity by 65 miles per hour in 24 hours.

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While scientists don’t fully understand rapid intensification, they do know that it has something to do with hurricanes being in a highly favorable environment for intensification in general.

Rapid strengthening tends to happen when waters are warm, when that warm water is deep, when the atmosphere is moist and when there’s little adverse wind flow that could disrupt the storm, according to research papers on the topic and interviews with experts.

And broadly speaking, what we appear to be seeing this year — similar to the catastrophic Atlantic hurricane season of 2005 — is that the environment is extremely hurricane friendly. Storms simply rev their engines and find that the fuel is of the highest grade, and there’s a deep well of it. Then they take off, and there’s nothing to disrupt them.

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This is the first time in known history that the Atlantic has had two storms with 150+ mph winds raging at the same time: Irma and Jos

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