Hurricane Melissa makes its Landfall at Jamaica at 23:10 IST.

Oct 2025 : Immediately after its landfall at 23:10 hours IST, the Hurricane Melissa – The Storm of the Century has demonstrated its devastating impact already claiming 07 lives till 00:15 IST.

03 people have died and 13 others were injured while preparing for Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica, Health Minister Dr. Christopher Tufton confirmed. 02 of the people were cutting trees and the third was electrocuted, according to the official sources. Another 03 people have also died in Haiti and 01 in the Dominican Republic, where another individual remains missing amid the storm, the officials reported.

Category 5 is the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Major hurricanes in this category have winds reaching at least 157 miles per hour.

Meteorologists have forecasted that hurricanes are now twice as likely to catapult from a minor to whopper than what it used to be decades ago. With warmer oceans serving as fuel, Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to rapidly intensify from wimpy minor hurricanes to powerful and catastrophic.

In September 2023, Hurricane Lee went from barely a hurricane at 80 miles per hour (129 kilometres per hour) to the most powerful Category 5 hurricane with 155 mph (249 kph) winds in 24 hours. In 2017, before it devastated Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria went from a Category 1 storm with 90 mph (145 kph) to a top-of-the-chart whopper with 160 mph (257 kph) winds in just 15 hours.

A meteorological study evaluating 830 Atlantic tropical cyclones since 1971 found that in the last 20 years, 8.1% of the time storms powered from a Category 1 minor storm to a major hurricane in just 24 hours. That happened only 3.2% of the time from 1971 to 1990. Category 1 hurricanes top out at 95 mph (153 kph) and a hurricane has to have at least 111 mph (178 kph) winds to become major.

Those are the most extreme cases, but the fact that the rate of such turbocharging has more than doubled is disturbing, said study author Andra Garner, a climate scientist at Rowan University in New Jersey.

When storms rapidly intensify, especially as they near land, it makes it difficult for people in the storm’s path to decide on what they should do, to evacuate or take shelter. It also makes it harder for meteorologists to predict how bad it will be and for emergency managers to prepare, Garner and other scientists said.

“We know that our strongest, most damaging storms very often do intensify very quickly at some point in their lifetimes”, Garner said, highlighting 2017’s Maria, which some researchers said killed nearly 3,000 people directly and indirectly. “We’re talking about something that’s hard to predict that certainly can lead to a more destructive storm. And this has become more common in the last 50 years. This has all happened over a time period when we’ve seen ocean waters get warmer. We’ve had 90% of the excess warming that humans have caused to the planet going into our oceans”.

Oceans this year have been setting heat records monthly since April with scientists warning of off-the-charts temperatures. Garner found the rapid intensification of hurricanes was primarily along the East Coast’s Atlantic seaboard, more so than the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s not just the cases of extreme rapid intensification. Garner looked at all storms over different time periods and found that in general they’re intensifying faster than they used to. There have been more Atlantic storms in the last few decades than in the 1970s and 1980s, scientists have several theories for why, from changes in air pollution to natural cycles, but Garner said by looking at percentages she took out the storm frequency factor.

Previous studies had found an increase in rapid intensification. Garner’s study was statistically meticulous in confirming what scientists had figured, said Karthik Balaguru, a Pacific Northwest National Lab climate scientist who in 2022 had a paper demonstrating how storms near the Atlantic coast are intensifying faster before landfall than they did in the 1970s and 1980s.

The National Hurricane Center considers a storm to rapidly intensify if it increases wind speed by 35 mph (46 kph) in 24 hours. “If we don’t work to lower our (carbon) emissions, then that’s a trend that we likely could expect to see continue to happen in the future, and even get worse”, Garner said.

Suvro Sanyal – Team Maverick