The extraordinary intensification of Hurricane Melissa, set to be one of the strongest storms to ever hit Jamaica, is probably a symptom of the rapid heating of the world’s oceans, scientists have said.
Melissa was a tropical storm on Saturday, before exploding in strength to a category 4 hurricane early on Sunday. The storm’s winds escalated from 70mph to 140mph in just a day, one of the fastest intensifications on record in the Atlantic Ocean.
On Monday morning, the US’s National Hurricane Center upgraded Melissa further to a category 5 storm, with winds of up to 160mph. The hurricane is inching slowly towards Jamaica, where it is feared it will cause catastrophic flooding and landslides, before crossing Cuba and the Bahamas by Wednesday.
Scientists said this is the fourth storm in the Atlantic this year to undergo rapid intensification of its wind speed and power. This sort of intensification has been linked to the human-caused climate crisis, which is causing oceans to become hotter.
“That part of the Atlantic is extremely warm right now – around 30C (86F), which is 2 to 3C above normal,” said Akshay Deoras, a meteorologist at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom. “And it’s not just the surface. The deeper layers of the ocean are also unusually warm, providing a vast reservoir of energy for the storm.”
Last year, the world’s oceans were the warmest on record, continuing a recent trend of record-breaking marine heat. Climate Central, a climate nonprofit, has said that the extra heat in the Atlantic has been made around 700 times more likely due to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and other human activities.
“Climate change is fundamentally changing our weather,” said Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at Climate Central, a US-based research group.
“It does not mean that every single tropical cyclone is going to go through rapid or super-rapid intensification. However, in our warmer world, it will continue to increase the likelihood of storms going through rapid and super-rapid intensification,” she added.
A 2023 study had found that Atlantic hurricanes are now more than twice as likely as before to intensify rapidly from minor storms to powerful and catastrophic events.
Climate scientists have long warned that warming oceans – driven by greenhouse gas emissions – are making such explosive storm development more common. “We’re living in a warmer world, and that means hurricanes are more likely to intensify quickly, especially near coastlines,” Deoras said.
The impact of climate change is putting lives at risk on islands and in coastal areas, Placky said. “With 90% of our extra heat going into our oceans, we’re seeing these oceans warm and they’re rising. And that plays out with sea level rise. So even outside of any storm, the water levels are getting higher. They’re creeping away at our coastlines and they’re going farther inland,” she said.
A storm like Melissa only compounds these impacts, according to Placky. “These storms are really ripping away at the coastal infrastructure of these islands,” she said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) predicted a busier-than-usual Atlantic hurricane season this year, with 13 to 18 named storms, five to nine hurricanes and two to five major hurricanes. After a slow start, that has been largely accurate so far.
