October 28, 2025
3 min reading
How Hurricane Melissa Became One of the Most Intense Atlantic Storms on Record
A near-perfect alignment of factors allowed Hurricane Melissa to become one of the most intense Atlantic storms on record.
On October 28, Hurricane Melissa became one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. The Category 5 hurricane has winds of 185 miles per hour and a central pressure of 892 millibars, tying it with the 1935 Labor Day hurricane as the third most intense storm ever measured in the Atlantic. The 1935 storm caused enormous damage and wiped out the Florida Keys.
“It’s about as powerful as hurricanes,” says Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami. Even in the western Pacific, where powerful storms are more common, few tropical cyclones could reach this intensity.
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The reason Melissa was able to achieve this rarefied endeavor is a near-perfect alignment of circumstances. “This allows you to take advantage of whatever conditions are possible at the moment,” says McNoldy.
“It’s this frustrating combination: Scientifically speaking, we know it’s possible, but as humans we’re amazed that it manifests in this way,” says Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona.
The driving force at the heart of any tropical cyclone is convection fueled by the temperature difference between the warm sea surface and the cold atmosphere at the top of the storm, where air escapes. This flow emerges at a layer called the tropopause, which marks the boundary between the troposphere (where Earth’s weather occurs) and the overlying stratosphere. The tropopause is higher in the tropics than in more temperate latitudes. It is also higher in the Pacific than in the tropical Atlantic, which partly explains why Pacific typhoons are often stronger than Atlantic hurricanes (although they are the same phenomenon). Melissa takes full advantage of this tropopause height and its extremely cold cloud tops, fueling its exceptional convection.
LEARN MORE: Hurricane Science Uses a Lot of Jargon: Here’s What It All Means
At the bottom of its convection engine, Melissa was stationed “basically above the warmest water the Atlantic has to offer right now,” McNoldy says. Ocean temperatures in the Caribbean peak in October after the summer months, when “the ocean sits and cooks,” he adds.
Buoy measurements from a week ago showed water temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher out to 60 meters (nearly 200 feet). “There was a very widespread bath underneath what eventually became Melissa,” says Wood.
Normally, a storm as slow as Melissa was — with forward motion of 3 to 5 mph — would bring up colder waters from deeper in the ocean, ultimately weakening the storm. But there’s enough heat in that area that this didn’t happen to Melissa. “This is pretty much the perfect place for this to happen,” says McNoldy.
On the other hand, if Melissa had moved faster, she might not have been able to feed on the warm waters for as long as she did. This hurricane has barely moved in the last week.
The time the hurricane spent on this wealth of heat also helped it maintain its incredible intensity for so long: it has been a Category 5 storm for more than a day.
Melissa grew from a tropical storm to a major hurricane in a process known as rapid intensification, which occurs when a storm’s winds increase at least 35 mph in 24 hours. Melissa’s winds increased twice as much during its first period of rapid intensification. “It’s extraordinary,” says McNoldy.
Perhaps even more surprising is that Melissa experienced another period of rapid intensification when it was already a Category 4 hurricane. And it not only maintained its Category 5 status as it slowly moved closer to Jamaica, but it also continued to intensify. Normally, when storms begin to interact with land, especially with hilly terrain like Jamaica’s, friction begins to disrupt and weaken them. Yet Hurricane Melissa “seems to not even know Jamaica is there,” McNoldy says. “It looks completely intact.”
It is clear that with climate change, ocean temperatures are increasing and tropical systems have more moisture. And there is a clear trend toward increasingly intense rapid intensification and a higher proportion of storms reaching higher intensities. It’s unclear whether we’ll see more situations where conditions align perfectly to allow hurricanes to reach their maximum potential, Wood says. But Melissa will likely spark more research into this question.
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