Hurricane Melissa, is set to make a landfall today (October 28), the strongest storm of the year 2025.
It is the intensity that makes it catastrophic, from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane with winds of 281 kmph in less than five days.
According to the latest updates from the U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC), the storm will cause “destructive winds” and “catastrophic flooding,” with conditions forecast to deteriorate further throughout the day and night.
Hurricane Melissa is seen as the strongest hurricane to directly strike the island in recorded history.
The Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness alerted on Monday, October 27, 2025, expressing fears of a mass evacuation, saying: “if the Category 5 storm was to hit with full force, then I don’t believe there is any infrastructure within this region that could withstand a Category 5 storm, so there could be significant dislocation.”
Hurricane Melissa’s primary danger lies in its rapid intensification, a climate-fueled phenomenon that’s causing more frequent and severe storms to the region.
On Saturday, Melissa was merely a tropical storm, but within a day, its wind speeds skyrocketed from 115 kmph to 225 kilometers per hour by Sunday.
By Monday morning, it had become a Category 5 hurricane, that ranks among the fastest ever recorded in the Caribbean.
By the afternoon, the wind speed reached 281 kmph, according to the US NHC, making it 2025’s most powerful global storm.
According to climate scientists, this is mainly a symptom of rising ocean temperatures globally.
“It doesn’t mean that every single tropical cyclone is going to go through rapid or super-rapid intensification. However, in our warmer world, it will continue to increase the likelihood of storms going through rapid and super-rapid intensification," said Bernadetta Woods Placky, a chief meteorologist at Climate, in an interview with The Guardian.
Akshay Deoras, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in the UK, also agreed, “That part of the Atlantic is extremely warm right now—around 30 degrees Celsius, which is 2 to 3°C above normal. It’s not just the surface; the deeper layers of the ocean are also unusually warm, providing a vast reservoir of energy for the storm.”
A 2023 study had found (validating expert claims) that the Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as in the past to rapidly escalate from weak storms into catastrophic events.