As predicted and feared, Hurricane Melissa has become a formidable hurricane in the central Caribbean that is positioned to wreak havoc over Jamaica early this week. Melissa’s top sustained winds vaulted from 70 mph at 11 a.m. EDT Saturday, October 25, to 140 mph at 5 a.m. EDT Sunday, marking one of the most rapid intensifications on record in the Atlantic. Melissa is predicted to reach Category 5 strength as it drifts west through Monday, then to make a sharp right turn – feeling the tug of an intensifying upper low over the eastern United States – and accelerate into the south coast of Jamaica early Tuesday.
As of 2 p.m. EDT Sunday, Melissa was located about 110 miles (180 kilometers) south of Kingston, Jamaica, moving west at 5 mph (7 km/h). Melissa’s top sustained winds remained at 140 mph (220 km/h).
If forecasts from Sunday prove accurate, Melissa will be the most powerful hurricane ever known to make landfall in Jamaica, bringing life-threatening winds and storm surge.
Apart from landfall itself, Melissa will inundate the island with days of rainfall that could total more than 40 inches in some areas, making devastating floods and landslides a virtual certainty. Melissa is being blamed for three deaths in Haiti and widespread damaging flooding in the Dominican Republic. Both countries could experience locally torrential downpours from Melissa’s outer rainbands into Wednesday, so the danger level for floods and mudslides will remain high and could increase in some areas.
Track forecast for Melissa
Most models show Melissa making a direct hit for Jamaica late Monday night or early Tuesday morning after its expected sharp right turn. However, we’ve seen in the past how the high terrain of the island can play crazy tricks with the path of an approaching hurricane. The island of Taiwan in the Western Pacific also has this effect on approaching typhoons. As of midday Sunday, the most recent model guidance suggested that landfall could be a bit further west than earlier expected, perhaps toward the south-central coast of Jamaica. Such a track would still keep heavily populated southeast Jamaica – including Kingston, the capital and largest city – on the storm’s more intense right-hand side.
There is now strong model agreement that Melissa will accelerate north-northeast by midweek, bringing the hurricane across eastern Cuba on Tuesday night. Melissa’s strength at that point will hinge largely on the hurricane’s exact track across Jamaica, but a Hurricane Watch was already in effect on Sunday for eastern Cuba, and significant hurricane impacts are quite possible there. Depending upon how much of a favor Jamaica does for Cuba by disrupting Melissa, Cuba can expect to see Melissa make landfall at between Cat 2 and Cat 4 strength. Inland flooding and mudslides from Melissa’s torrential rains are likely to be the main hazard in Cuba, but damage from high winds and storm surge are also likely to be substantial, depending upon the exact track of the hurricane in relation to the island’s population centers. Cuba’s fragile electrical grid has endured five complete island-wide collapses in the past year, each one requiring about 2-3 days to recover from. Melissa will be a threat to take down the grid for a sixth time.
Although Melissa will weaken as it picks up northeastward speed, there is a significant chance it will remain a hurricane as it races through the southeastern Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands on Wednesday or Thursday. This fast motion will limit the rains of the hurricane, but rainfall amounts of 5-10 inches (125-250 mm) are being shown over portions of the Bahamas by some model runs. It’s not out of the question that Melissa could move near or even across Bermuda on Friday, October 31, while still a hurricane. The island’s latest landfalling hurricane on record was an unnamed Category 3 hurricane that struck on October 22, 1926.
As of early Sunday, there were no longer any ensemble members from the European, GFS, or Google DeepMind models bringing Melissa into the U.S. East Coast, although there remains an outside chance of a left hook toward Nova Scotia in a week or so.
Intensity forecast for Melissa
Melissa has been taking advantage of extreme warmth across central Caribbean waters that have been untouched by any tropical cyclones during the relatively low-impact 2025 hurricane season thus far. Sea surface temperatures across the Caribbean as of October 25 were among the warmest on record for the date, apart from the record-warm years of 2023 and 2024. The odds of such unusual warmth have been boosted at least 500-fold by human-caused climate change, according to the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central (see Fig. 2).
Melissa is now a powerful, well-organized hurricane that is predicted to remain over deep warm water well away from land through at least Monday, with only moderate wind shear to contend with. This means that hard-to-predict internal mechanisms will determine whether Melissa reaches Category 5 strength, when that might occur, and how long it persists. At least one eyewall replacement cycle can be expected, perhaps as soon as late Sunday. Such cycles can dent a hurricane’s top sustained winds by as much as a Saffir-Simpson category, but the wind field typically expands, increasing the area under threat. Melissa could also have time to recover from a single eyewall replacement prior to landfall.
As of 11 a.m. EDT Sunday, the National Hurricane Center predicted Melissa to reach Category 5 strength on Monday and to make landfall early Tuesday with catastrophic top-end Category 4 winds of 155 mph. It can’t be stressed enough that Jamaica has never experienced a recorded landfall that strong. Even Hurricane Gilbert in 1988, which caused severe damage, crossed the length of the island from east-southeast to north-northwest as a Category 3 storm with top sustained winds of 125 mph.
Inland flood risk for Jamaica: very high
Flash flooding and mudslides from the 20-30 inches of rain predicted for Jamaica are the chief risk from Melissa, and pose a catastrophic threat. Posted below are graphics from the Pacific Disaster Center showing the areas at highest risk.
Storm surge risk for Jamaica
Jamaica, in general, has low storm surge risk, since there are not a lot of low-lying coastal areas. But with NHC predicting 9-13 feet of inundation to the right of where the center makes landfall, the capital of Kingston may see destructive storm surge flooding if Melissa follows the current NHC forecast. Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport is built on dredged material and imported fill, and the runways and terminal could flood to a depth of 3-6 feet in a Cat 3 hurricane, according to NHC storm surge risk maps (see Fig. 4 below).
In 2004, Hurricane Ivan, which passed about 30 miles (50 km) south of central Jamaica as a Category 4 storm with 150 mph winds, caused total destruction of the sand dunes along the south side of the airport, inundating and blocking the connecting road to the mainland. This led to the complete shutdown of the airport and the inability of Port Royal residents to access the mainland. Hurricane Dean of 2007, which passed about 20 miles (35 km) south of central Jamaica as a Category 4 storm with 145 mph (235 km/h) winds, caused a similar impact, resulting in the shutdown of the airport. Since then, construction of the rock revetment along the south side of the airport has improved its capability to withstand a damaging storm surge.
Other storm-surge vulnerable places in Kingston include the Soapberry Wastewater Treatment Plant, Portmore Mall, Kingston Freeport Terminal, Nestlè Jamaica Limited, Jamworld Entertainment Center, the National Gallery of Jamaica, Petrojam Refinery, and Caribbean Maritime University. Not many residential areas are at risk of flooding in a Cat 3 storm, with the exception of a few low-lying areas on the west side of the city and in Port Royal (on the island connecting to the airport).
Melissa’s unusual angle of approach
Jamaica’s costliest hurricane on record was 1988’s Gilbert, which inflicted damages of $1 billion ($2.7 billion 2025 USD), which was 26% of its $3.2 billion GDP at the time. Gilbert’s path from east to west along the length of the island did not generate a large storm surge along Jamaica’s south coast, where Kingston lies. Unlike Gilbert and other most hurricanes that threaten Jamaica, Melissa is predicted to make landfall from the south-southwest. Unusual trajectories can lead to unusual impacts, if only because people and ecosystems may be unaccustomed to the ways in which winds and seas may be affected. In this case, storm surge may be exacerbated by Melissa’s angle of approach.
Few hurricanes – and no major ones – have struck Jamaica’s south coast from the south or southwest in 175 years of NOAA data. An unnamed 1974 storm hit the south central coast while moving northeast with Cat 2 winds of 105 mph, and Hurricane Sandy struck just east of Kingston while moving north-northeast as a minimal Cat 1 storm. An unnamed 1912 hurricane that approached from the west-southwest nicked the northwest coast of Jamaica at Category 3 strength with 125-mph winds.
Melissa’s place in hurricane history
Melissa’s rise to major hurricane status gives the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season 13 named storms, 5 hurricanes, 4 major hurricanes, and an accumulated cyclone energy, or ACE, index at 92% of the average to date. The 1991-2020 averages by this point in the season are 13.1 named storms, 6.4 hurricanes, and 3.0 major hurricanes.
Remarkably, four out of five of this year’s Atlantic hurricanes have been Category 4 or 5 storms — the highest percentage ever observed in any hurricane season in the NOAA database going back to 1851. Hurricanes Erin and Humberto were the two prior Cat 5 storms this year; Gabrielle was a Cat 4. The year’s only underachieving hurricane thus far was Hurricane Imelda, which topped out as a Cat 2. As highlighted by Steve Bowen (Gallagher Re) below, and reflected in numerous studies over the past 20 years, hurricane-strength storms are not becoming more numerous globally, but the fraction of such storms that reach Category 4 or 5 strength is growing and expected to keep growing, so the world is seeing more of these intense tropical cyclones – which tend to be the most deadly and destructive ones.
Melissa isn’t the first Atlantic storm this year to undergo rapid intensification, a phenomenon that’s becoming ever more frequent and dangerous in our human-warmed climate.
The year’s first Cat 5 hurricane, Erin, vaulted from tropical storm to Cat 4 strength in 21 hours and 50 minutes, and it went from tropical storm to Cat 5 status in 27 hours and 20 minutes. The Atlantic’s record for going from tropical storm to Cat 5 strength was set in the northwest Caribbean on October 18–19, 2005, when Hurricane Wilma did so in just 24 hours. Wilma was also a hair faster than Melissa in zipping from tropical storm to Cat 4 strength, doing so in just 17 hours.
Many of these records hinge on the irregular timing of reconnaissance flights – so for all intents and purposes, we can place Melissa in the very top tier of rapid Atlantic intensifiers.
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Great Job Bob Henson and Jeff Masters & the Team @ Yale Climate Connections Source link for sharing this story.
