Conor here: Just to add a few more observations to the ones below:
A wind gust of 252 mph was just measured above the surface in Hurricane Melissa as the storm continues to intensify right up until landfall.
This is the worst-case scenario for Jamaica. pic.twitter.com/uIyyW9BD5u
— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) October 28, 2025
This dropsonde thru the south and southeast part of #Melissa’s eyewall is the most insane dropsonde I’ve ever seen.
*Mean* winds in the lowest 150m of 188 knot/216 mph with gusts upwards of 219 knot/252 mph!!
Absolutely scary and historic hurricane is headed into SW Jamaica pic.twitter.com/agYOOtAy9V
— Eric Webb (@webberweather) October 28, 2025
Yeah I’m not gonna lie, Hurricane #Melissa feels like the closest thing I’ve seen to the Atlantic’s version of Hurricane Haiyan #Melissa (left), #Haiyan (2013) (right) pic.twitter.com/rAcZRr1GBK
— Eric Webb (@webberweather) October 28, 2025
By Jake Johnson, a a senior editor and staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams.
Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday as a monstrous Category 5 storm as the island country braced for devastating impacts, humanitarian operations urgently mobilized, and experts voiced horror at the latest climate-fueled weather disaster.
“This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation,” the National Hurricane Center said in an update after the storm made landfall.
Early video footage posted to social media shows the storm—the most powerful to ever strike the island and the third-strongest to ever form in the Atlantic—wreaking havoc and destruction.
🇯🇲 | Video que muestra los daños y las inundaciones en el área de Black River, Jamaica, por el huracán Melissa. pic.twitter.com/k6RZDE9jdB
— Entredostv (@Entredostv1) October 28, 2025
Anne-Claire Fontan, the World Meteorological Organization’s tropical cyclone specialist, told reporters that “a catastrophic situation is expected in Jamaica” and described the hurricane as “the storm of the century” for the island. Melissa’s landfall is expected to bring extreme flooding, landslides, and other life-threatening impacts.
Tens of thousands of Jamaicans lost power as the slow-moving storm approached the island, bringing torrential rain and maximum sustained winds of 185 mph, with gusts over 220 mph. Storms like Melissa are the reason scientists are pushing to formally add a Category 6 for hurricanes.
“Unimaginable violence is hiding in the very small and compact eyewall of Melissa,” said Greg Postel, hurricane specialist at The Weather Channel. “Nearly continuous lightning will accompany the tornadic wind speeds.”
Melissa tonight has had one of the most powerful satellite presentations you will ever see for an Atlantic Hurricane. Perfect symmetry in all quadrants and satellite estimation techniques being maxed out, with Dvorak analysis yielding 871.1 mbar (recon found the real pressure to… pic.twitter.com/nKKFbv4g7j
— Backpirch Weather (@BackpirchCrew) October 28, 2025
The International Federation of the Red Cross said up to 1.5 million people in Jamaica—roughly half the island’s population—are expected to be directly affected by Hurricane Melissa, the strongest storm on Earth this year.
“We are okay at the moment but bracing ourselves for the worst,” Jamaican climate activist Tracey Edwards said Tuesday. “I’ve grown weary of these threats, and I do not want to face the next hurricane.”
The International Organization for Migration warned that “the risk of flooding, landslides, and widespread damage is extremely high,” meaning that “many people are likely to be displaced from their homes and in urgent need of shelter and relief.”
Melissa’s landfall came on the same day that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said the international community has failed to prevent planetary warming from surpassing the key 1.5°C threshold “in the next few years.”
Meteorologist Eric Holthaus wrote on social media that “this is the news I’ve dreaded all my life.”
“Humanity has failed to avoid dangerous climate change,” he wrote. “We have now entered the overshoot era. Our new goal is to prevent as many irreversible tipping points from taking hold as we can.”
Climate experts said Hurricane Melissa bears unmistakable fingerprints of the planetary crisis, which is driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.
The warming climate is “clearly making this horrific disaster for Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas even worse,” Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told the New York Times.
Akshay Deoras, a meteorologist at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, told the Associated Press that the Atlantic “is extremely warm right now.”
“And it’s not just the surface,” said Deoras. “The deeper layers of the ocean are also unusually warm, providing a vast reservoir of energy for the storm.”
Amira Odeh, Caribbean campaigner at 350.org, warned in a statement Tuesday that “what is happening in Jamaica is what climate injustice looks like.”
“Every home without electricity, every flooded hospital, every family cut off by the storm is a consequence of political inaction,” said Odeh. “We cannot continue losing Caribbean lives because of the fossil fuel industry’s greed.”
“As world leaders head to COP30, they must understand that every delay, every new fossil fuel project, means more lives lost,” Odeh added. “Jamaica is the latest warning, and Belém must be where we finally see a steer to change courses. The Caribbean is sounding the alarm once again. This time, the world must listen.”
I won’t hold my breath for a change.
Terrible storm for sure though. Two hospitals I know of in the South are inacessible due to flooding, one seeming to have taken structural damage and JA only has one major hospital per parish. Roofs have already torn off from some houses and, reportedly, cars are being blown away. The power company office in one of the southern parish has been completely destroyed too, with so much of this happening in just the last few hours.
185 mph! Category 7? The most vulnerable will be the recipients of the whirlwind the elites have sown. I don’t pray so there is nothing to do, but curse our folly.
” Our” folly? It was the elites’ folly. The rest of us did not and do not have the power to round up all the elites, physically exterminate them all, and then set up some better elites which will do our global-dewarming bidding.
Alice X: 185 mph! Category 7?
The Saffir–Simpson scale so far officially goes up only to Category 5, defined as sustained winds of 155 mph or above.
Fun fact: the energy distributed across a Category 5 storm’s wind field isn’t concentrated in space and time like a nuclear blast, but is far more immense — equivalent to something like 2.4 million Hiroshima bombs (each about 15 kilotons). If there were a Saffir-Simpson category 6, Melissa would be it and some people that study such things have talked about the need to eventually create that category officially the way we’re headed and maybe even a Category 7.
Alice X: The most vulnerable will be the recipients of the whirlwind the elites have sown. I don’t pray so there is nothing to do, but curse our folly.
If you want to. Bigger storms have happened in the historical record before human activities ever started tipping the planetary climate. But yes, we’re going to see more and more of them.
Within my point, I seek to view the social trajectories of the most vulnerable and the elites that will plunder them.
Elites gonna #DisasterCapitalism the f outta Jamaica now if it’s destroyed.
Thank you, Alice X.
Edit: You are correct that it’s a collective folly. Some of us would rather point fingers rather than recognize that all of us, most particularly in the West, have played a part in this.
I spent a lot of time in Jamaica in the 80s and 90s and was there for hurricane Gilbert in the late 80s. That storm was rrelativey puny compared to Melissa, but it still did extensive damage. At that time the US flew over the island to assess damage and later provided food aid – I don’t expect that to happen under Trump.
Sorry, Mr. or Ms. Odeh. Our tech bastards have determined that we need to up our burning of coal and fossil fuels to power a huge number of new datacenters, all so that they can cash in on their bets on AI.
Climate be damned.
Could we have data in metric? Who the blazes knows what “252 mph” means in real terms?
252 mph is equal to about 405 kmph.
I suggest wolframalpha.com for all your conversion needs. I often use it for such conversions from metric to ‘british’ measurements so I can understand what the metric data means in real life to me. I have no historical personal reference to the use of metric data and it is mostly useless to me, having grown up in the U.S. all my life.
It is not so much the winds as debris propelled by those ferocious winds. Can you imagine being hit by a pencil that is traveling at such speeds? In America after a tornado hits, it has happened that farmers have discovered straw embedded into timber planks as those strands of straws were being propelled by those extreme winds.
>>>Can you imagine being hit by a pencil that is traveling at such speeds?
I would imagine that anything at that speed is likely to kill.
Now just imagine such a tornado hitting a razor blade factory.
Now imagine it hitting a bunch of sharks 😉
Well, Americans know what “252 mph” means in real terms. So why not offer both Traditional British measure for the Americans and Metric measure for the rest of the world?
Good idea, except that most of the detailed news reports about “Hurricanes” in the Atlantic or Caribbean are generated in countries that experience “Hurricanes” and who use the brit system that the NWS/NOAA use for public alerts and such. Or you could go to the navy meteorological site if you want it in Knots (wind speed in nautical miles per hour.)
Otherwise “Typhoons” located in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are most often more closely reported by agencies and sources that use the metric system. The recent phenomenon of ‘medicanes’ in the Mediterranean are always reported using the Metric system, since most people around there use it.
To report both would often require the author of a post to do any and all conversions for themselves – which falls under the rule here that we do not assign work to authors of articles, we do our own research.
Dont be lazy and complain. Even the dreaded G-monster provides an easy way to convert, just type “convert 252 mph to kmph.” I much prefer Wolframalpha as it gives you other neat facts that might pique someone’s interest about a particular number or windspeed.
“To report both would often require the author of a post to do any and all conversions for themselves – which falls under the rule here that we do not assign work to authors of articles, we do our own research.”
Thank you, debug, for stating the obvious.
Very good. TradBritish units it is, then.
A while back I did the math of calculating the overpressure from a much slower wind like 80 mph and it was still insane. I’ll see if I can do it again for this.
Knots is the traditional way to measure wind/airspeed in the nautical / aeronautical world. Since a nautical mile is one minute of arc it works well in going to/from lat-long. For the US, a nautical mile is close enough to 2000 yards so that also helps in conversions.
At least in my pre-computer days.
from https://www.weather.gov/bmx/fujitascale
This is for tornados, which are primarily windspeed (and not 15-200 miles wide, like a hurricane)
(F0) Gale tornado (40-72 mph)
Light damage. Some damage to chimneys; break branches off trees; push
over shallow-rooted trees; damage sign boards.
(F1) Moderate tornado (73-112 mph)
Moderate damage. The lower limit is the beginning of hurricane wind speed;
peel surface off roofs; mobile homes pushed off foundations or overturned;
moving autos pushed off the roads.
(F2) Significant tornado (113-157 mph)
Considerable damage. Roofs torn off frame houses; mobile homes demolished;
boxcars pushed over; large trees snapped or uprooted; light-object missiles
generated.
(F3) Severe tornado (158-206 mph)
Severe damage. Roofs and some walls torn off well-constructed houses;
trains overturned; most trees in forest uprooted; heavy cars lifted off the ground
and thrown.
(F4) Devastating tornado (207-260)
Devastating damage. Well-constructed houses leveled; structures with weak
foundations blown off some distance; cars thrown and large missiles generated.
(F5) Incredible tornado (261-318 mph)
Incredible damage. Strong frame houses lifted off foundations and carried
considerable distance to disintegrate; automobile sized missiles fly through
the air in excess of 100 meters(109 yds); trees debarked; incredible phenomena
will occur.
(from J. Atmos. Sci., August 1981, pg 1517-1519)
We have friends in a number of places in Jamaica, and were set to go for seven weeks on the 11th. An absolutely dreadful occurence which fills me with dread for the future, too. We were in Jamaica for Hurricane Ivan, which decimated the University of the West Indies campus where we were living at the time. In Grenada, where I did much of my dissertation work, one third of homes were destroyed by that same storm.
Hurricane Michael, here in Tallahassee, took half of my house–I was a year, more or less full time, rebuilding. 80-90 mph winds knock down trees; 250 mph gusts are beyond my ken. Several of our poorer friends, incl. in Augustown by the UWI campus, live in low-lying areas, as poor people world over do. I don’t know where this leaves Jamaica.
Sooner or later, storms like this are coming for us all, and we are ruled by people with no intent to ameliorate.
Michael was a catastrophe for Mexico Beach, and I am saddened to hear of your troubles in Tallahassee, a canopy road city even though inland. Jamaica has the makings of a Helene style event with landslides and flooding on order in the mountains. I loathe to learn the coastal impacts of Melissa which will be comparable to Michael.
Michael was a catastrophe for Mexico Beach, and I am saddened to hear of your troubles in Tallahassee, a canopy road city even though inland. Jamaica has the makings of a Helene style event with landslides and flooding on order in the mountains. I loathe to find out what
I will claim that I have spent the last few years every now and then offering comments about how we need to make the hurricane scale and the tornado scale open-ended at the top end.
For example, for hurricanes the wind-mph-difference between each category should be counted up and averaged, and then that amount/ number would be the distance between rungs on the open-ended Saffir-Simpson ladder. So . . . add that averaged number to a just-barely-cat-5 hurricane and it would become just-barely-cat-6. Add that number to a just-barely-cat-6 hurricane and it would be just barely cat-7. And so on up the Saffir-Simpson ladder.
As it is, the category 5 is more “dramatic” than analytically informative.
We should do the same for tornadoes. The Fujita scale should be opened up at the top. If future tornadoes are in fact ” F7″ or “F8” or “F9′ or etc., we should be able to say so.
Agreed.
While higher category hurricanes/cyclones are ever more catastrophic, when the loiter time from a slow moving system is added together with wind direction reversal as they pass over there is a further amplification of the destruction left behind.
My youngest brother was Peace Corps in Batanes Province, Phillipines long ago. Batanes is in the middle of a traditional and long-established Hurricane Alley. The Batanians’ traditional vernacular architectural response was to build every building, home, etc. with stone walls several feet thick. They then thatch-roofed these buildings with cogon grass, which was easy to replace when it blew off in every passing hurricane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperata_cylindrica
They also had quite a few crops developed to grow and mature fast in the window between the end of Cold Season and the start of Hurricane Season. For example he told me about a watermelon-type developed over time there that grew from seed to harvest in about 90 days or so, which I believe is faster than the average watermelon. ( Or am I too easy to impress?)