Hurricane Melissa, the Category 5 storm that tore through the Caribbean in late October, was the last and strongest storm so far from the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season.
Everything from its formation, strengthening, trajectory and structure was astonishing for experts monitoring the hurricane.
As of Nov. 10, around 90 deaths have been reported across the Caribbean, while thousands of people were displaced.
The hurricane reached sustained winds of almost 300 km/h with a central pressure of 892 millibars, one of the lowest registered in the Atlantic.
The season has seen a total of 13 named storms so far, which is a little bit below normal; however, out of those, five were hurricanes, with four of them being Category 3 or more.
According to the National Hurricane Centre (NHC), a hurricane forms when a storm’s sustained winds reach 120 km/h.
National Hurricane Center’s Hurricane Specialist Unit Chief Daniel Brown remarked on how historic the storm was due to multiple factors.
“It essentially was one of the strongest hurricanes on record, as well as one of the strongest hurricanes at landfall,” he said.
The storm, which reached Category 5, the strongest of all, found extremely favourable conditions for intensification and made landfall at maximum intensity, Brown said.
He highlighted the rainfall the storm caused, which affected areas far away from the landfall locations in Jamaica and Cuba, such as Hispaniola, where catastrophic flooding was reported.
“Across parts of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, they were more in the outer fringes, but they did get heavy rainfall for several days,” Brown said.
A full report of the storm will be available for next year, he said.
Rachel Modestino, a meteorologist at The Weather Network, said the fact that almost no storms moved through the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico contributed to some of the atmospheric conditions to be that favourable in the area.
Extremely warm waters at the surface and below acted as fuel for the storm to rapidly intensify.
“Melissa was really able to just sit over those waters and do whatever it wanted,” Modestino said.
She said how important the track of the storm is regarding the public’s perception of a storm, especially since there were three more major hurricanes this season that moved away from land and didn’t affect any country or territory significantly.
For Melissa, steering currents, which determine where a hurricane will move or go, were weak and allowed the hurricane to move slowly to take advantage of the environment surrounding it.
“We knew that the environment was good and we knew that we were likely looking at a major hurricane, if not Cat 5, just based on the environment,” she said.
Wind shear, when the wind strength changes with height, was a decisive factor in the environment that avoided the storm from intensifying initially became more favourable as the storm moved south of Jamaica, causing its explosive intensification, Modestino said.
“It really got to a point where it was almost as strong as meteorology can go on Earth,” Modestino said. “It was definitely probably a worst-case scenario for a lot of the Caribbean islands this year.”
She also said that for this specific storm, weather patterns directed the storm towards the Caribbean instead of curving it out to sea, as it occurred with the rest of the hurricanes of the season.
Senior Climatologist with ECCC, David Phillips, said while it’s almost impossible to point out if a specific storm was so intense because of climate change, at the time a storm forms, it will take full advantage of atmospheric conditions.
“Any (storm) that develops could be monstrous," he said. "If you get fewer, then more of those fewer are going to be forest fires.”
With a warmer climate, more moisture is available in the sea and the atmosphere for storms to take advantage of, especially if previous storms don’t form, so they don’t benefit from these conditions, he said.
“Water temperature is so high that it is keeping these storms alive longer,” Phillips said.
He also pointed out that the human factor over land is also contributing to a more favourable environment for storms.
“We cut down trees for farmland. And so therefore, the forest is not there to absorb the rain and prevent the landslides,” he said.
A lack of trees will make hurricanes hazards such as storm surge, combined with sea level rise, even more impactful in the future.
He finally said it’s very likely that Melissa’s name will be retired next year, so its name won’t be used ever again to name a tropical cyclone in the Atlantic Ocean.
