October 28, 2025
3 minute read
How Hurricane Melissa became one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record
A near-perfect combination of factors allowed Hurricane Melissa to become one of the most powerful Atlantic storms ever recorded.
October 28 Hurricane Melissa became one of the most powerful hurricanes ever known in the Atlantic Ocean. Category 5 hurricane It has wind speeds of 185 mph and a central pressure of 892 millibars, ranking it tied with the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 as the third most powerful storm ever observed in the Atlantic. The 1935 storm caused enormous damage and destroyed the Florida Keys.
“It's about the same strength 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 reach such intensity.
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The reason Melissa was able to connect with this rare group of people is because of an almost perfect coincidence. “At this point, we're using every possible condition,” McNoldy says.
“It's a frustrating combination of the fact that—scientifically—we know it's possible, but as humans we're stunned to see it happen,” says Kim Wood, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Arizona.
At the heart of any tropical cyclone is convection, caused by the temperature difference between the warm sea surface and the cold atmosphere at the top of the storm, where the air escapes. This outflow occurs in a layer called the tropopause, which marks the boundary between the troposphere (where Earth's weather occurs) and the stratosphere above. The tropopause is higher in the tropics than in more temperate latitudes. It is also higher over the Pacific Ocean than over the tropical Atlantic, which is one reason why typhoons in the Pacific Ocean are often stronger than hurricanes in the Atlantic (even though they are the same phenomenon). Melissa takes full advantage of the tropopause heights and extremely cold cloud tops, fueling exceptional convection.
READ MORE: There's a lot of jargon in hurricane science: here's what it all means
At the bottom of its convective engine, Melissa was parked “virtually over the warmest water that the Atlantic has to offer right now,” McNoldy says. Ocean temperatures in the Caribbean peak in October after the summer months, when “the ocean just sits and cooks,” he adds.
Buoy measurements taken a week ago showed water temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) or warmer at depths of up to 60 meters (nearly 200 feet). “Underneath what eventually became Melissa was an expansive bathtub,” Wood says.
Typically a slow-moving storm like Melissa, with a forward motion of 3 to 5 mph, will bring up colder waters from the deeper ocean, ultimately weakening the storm. But this area is warm enough to prevent this from happening to Melissa. “This is almost the perfect place for it,” McNoldy says.
On the other hand, if Melissa had moved faster, she might not have been able to feed on warm water for as long as she did. This hurricane has barely moved over the past week.
The time the hurricane spent above this wealth of heat also helped it maintain its incredible strength for so long: the Category 5 storm has now lasted more than a day.
Melissa intensified from a tropical storm to a major hurricane through a process known as rapid intensification, which occurs when a storm's wind speed increases by at least 35 mph over a 24-hour period. Melissa's winds doubled in strength during the first period of rapid intensification. “It’s unusual,” McNoldy says.
Perhaps even more striking was that Melissa experienced another period of rapid intensification after it was already a Category 4 hurricane. And not only did it maintain its Category 5 status as it slowly approached Jamaica, it continued to intensify. Typically, when storms begin to interact with land, especially hilly terrain like Jamaica, friction begins to erode and weaken them. But Hurricane Melissa “doesn't even seem to know Jamaica exists,” McNoldy says. “Looks completely untouched.”
Clearly, with climate change, ocean temperatures are rising and tropical systems are receiving more moisture. And there is a clear trend toward more—and more intense—rapid intensification and an increasing proportion of storms reaching higher intensities. It's unclear whether we'll see more situations in which conditions are ideal for allowing hurricanes to reach their maximum potential, Wood says. But Melissa will likely stimulate a lot more research on this issue.
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