Melissa becomes third Category 5 hurricane of the extraordinary 2025 season

For only the second time in recorded history, an Atlantic season has produced three Category 5 hurricanes... the previous year was 2005.  This puts 2025 in an elite class of hurricane seasons. It also means that nearly 7% of all known Category 5 hurricanes have occurred just in this year.

Early Monday morning, Melissa reached the rare Category 5 intensity -- and is still intensifying. The terrible aspect of this is that the center is only 100 miles from the southern coast of Jamaica, and will soon be headed toward the island.  No Category 5 hurricane has made a direct landfall on Jamaica in recorded history.  No one living there has ever experienced anything like what is about to happen.

Over the next three days, Melissa will slowly crawl across Jamaica, then begin accelerating as it crosses eastern Cuba and then the eastern Bahamas.  

Aside from being subjected to extremely destructive winds for a day+, coastal areas will experience extremely destructive long-duration storm surge of perhaps 9-13 feet, and the entire island and surrounding areas will experience extremely destructive long-duration flash flooding and mudslides, with some parts of Jamaica forecast to possibly get over 3 feet of rain.

[see SciAm's article from October 23: "Major Hurricane Melissa Will Drop Catastrophic Amounts of Rain on Jamaica"]

I have long updating radar loops available at https://bmcnoldy.earth.miami.edu/tropics/radar/, though I fear we may lose the radar in Kingston, Jamaica as the eyewall approaches.

As I wrote in Friday's post, the ACE will indeed cross back above the "average" line today, and continue to climb in the coming days, probably boosting the season's total above 100% for the remainder of the season -- even if nothing else forms.

There is nothing of interest for new development in the foreseeable future, but the season is not over. Water temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico are extremely warm (anomalously warm for the date) and those exactly the areas we have to watch out for in this late part of the season.  The next name on the list is Nestor.

https://bmcnoldy.earth.miami.edu/tropics/sectors/

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