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Climate change enhanced intensity of Hurricane Melissa, according to the World Weather Attribution-study WWA scientific report No. 76 (WWA).

Early on October 28th, Hurricane Melissa made landfall on the southern coast of Jamaica as a Category 5 storm on the Saffir–Simpson scale, bringing extreme winds, torrential rainfall, and life-threatening storm surges to coastal areas. The following day, Melissa weakened to a Category 3 hurricane before striking Cuba, while also bringing heavy rain and flooding to the neighbouring countries of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. While it will likely take weeks to fully assess the extent of the damage, it is already clear that Melissa led to widespread destruction and severe disruption to critical infrastructure, including washed-out roads, damaged water systems, power outages, and communication failures. At least 28 people have been confirmed dead in Jamaica at the time of writing (Jamaican Government, 2025), with at least another 31 fatalities reported in Haiti and two confirmed deaths in the Dominican Republic (BBC, 2025), leading to a total of 61 deaths (4th November 2025) across the affected Caribbean islands. Agricultural losses have been extensive, with crops destroyed and approximately 25,000 people were displaced and seeking refuge in emergency shelters in Jamaica, 6,000 of which are still in shelters a week after the hurricane hit (BBC, 2025). In Cuba, 241 communities were still without access to communication at the end of the week, affecting more than 140,000 (Reuters, 2025). The loss of communication and weather monitoring systems, including radar installations, has made it difficult to accurately estimate the total rainfall or the full scale of the damage caused by Hurricane Melissa.

The influence of climate change on tropical cyclones is more complex compared to other types of extreme weather events as impacts are driven by both heavy rainfall and extreme winds. In addition, the surrounding conditions, in particular the sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, are crucial for the formation of hurricanes. Here, scientists from Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, United States, United Kingdom, Sweden and the Netherlands, use several approaches to investigate the influence of climate change on different aspects of hurricane Melissa, following the same approach as with Hurricane Helene. For the assessment of the role of climate change in the heavy rainfall, we divide the most impacted region into two subregions: Jamaica, where Melissa made landfall and caused two days of extreme rainfall, following three days of heavy rainfall before the landfall; and the Eastern part of Cuba (figure 1). In both regions we assess the 5-days of heaviest rainfall. To study the conditions that formed and fuelled Melissa, the role of climate change in the high sea surface temperatures that fueled the storm were analysed, and in “potential intensity”, a metric that combines sea surface temperature, air temperature and air humidity data to estimate maximum hurricane wind speeds.

Links:
Climate change enhanced intensity of Hurricane Melissa, testing limits of adaptation in Jamaica and eastern Cuba