Scientists say the destructive power of Hurricane Melissa, the strongest hurricane to ever hit Jamaica and one of the most intense in the Atlantic basin, was boosted by our overheating planet.
A new study by World Weather Attribution, an international scientific collaboration that analyzes how our warming world is shaping the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, found that record-breaking Hurricane Melissa was supercharged by our planet's warming climate.
The power of Melissa is reflected in the storm's staggering statistics it produced. Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane with sustained winds of around 185 mph to tie it with two other hurricanes for the strongest landfall on record in the Atlantic. Melissa's wind and pressure measurements made it one of the most intense hurricanes to ever form in the Atlantic basin.
"That's pretty rare to have a storm that strong," Texas A&M professor of atmospheric sciences Andrew Dessler told the Associated Press. "And I think that, to the extent that this is a harbinger of the future, it's not good."
The Jamaican government reported that at least 28 people were killed in the island country. Another 31 deaths were reported in Haiti. In total, there were an estimated 61 killed across the Caribbean islands that were impacted by Melissa. The WWA analysis found this was a bad storm made even worse by our overheating planet.
The WWA rapid attribution study released Thursday found that Melissa's maximum wind speeds were increased by around 7%, while the storm's rainfall rate in the eye wall was about 16% more intense because of our world's warming temperatures.
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"Warmer ocean temperatures are effectively the engine that drives a hurricane. … The warmer the ocean temperatures, the greater the wind speed a hurricane can have," added Theodore Keeping, one of the climate scientists who was a part of the WWA team that analyzed Hurricane Melissa.
The authors of the study credited forecasts available at least seven days before Melissa's landfall in Jamaica and Cuba for giving people in these regions enough lead time to prepare for the arrival of the storm, likely helping save several lives. However, they also raised concerns about how a storm with Melissa's strength can test those countries' limits to adapt.
"While additional adaptation efforts could be made, with such an intense storm, we cannot reasonably expect preparedness actions to have averted all impacts, as the storm tests some of the soft limits to adaptation, especially with regard to infrastructure," according to the WWA analysis.
The WWA study of Melissa follows another attribution study of the storm conducted by the Grantham Institute - Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. "A 'Melissa' type hurricane at landfall is about four times more likely in the 2025 climate compared to a preindustrial baseline," according to researchers. They also found "that climate change increased the maximum wind speed by 7% and the economic damage by 34%."
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