Hurricane Melissa, which made landfall on Tuesday on the south coast of Jamaica, not only made history, the storm shocked hurricane experts with its abilities.

Melissa had sustained wind speeds at landfall of 185 mph, which ties for the strongest Atlantic landfall in recorded history with the 1935 Labor Day hurricane and 2019’s Hurricane Dorian.

The Labor Day storm hit the Florida Keys and killed hundreds of people, and Dorian hit Abaco in the Bahamas, killing 74 people and leaving hundreds more missing, according to the Bahamian government. The storm later caused at least 78 deaths in the United States.

Startling endurance

Hurricane’s don’t usually maintain Category 5 strength (sustained winds of 157 mph or higher) for very long.

This year’s hurricanes Humberto and Erin, which never made landfall, each had a six-hour stretch of Cat 5 power.

2005’s Katrina managed 18 hours.

Melissa stayed at Category 5 for 36 hours, the fifth-longest in recorded history, according to WPLG-TV hurricane specialist Michael Lowry’s Eye on the Tropics newsletter.

Highest hurricane winds ever?

On Tuesday, Hurricane Hunters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dropped a dropsonde, an instrument used to measure windspeed, into Melissa’s eyewall. When the dropsonde neared the ocean’s surface it measured a sudden wind gust of 252 mph.

“That is perhaps the highest windspeed measurement made by a dropsonde (inside a tropical cyclone) in history,” said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher with the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. He said it could be confirmed later this year.

Extreme intensification

A storm that ramps up in wind speed by 35 mph within 24 hours is considered by NOAA to be rapidly intensifying. Melissa turbocharged by about 70 mph during a 24-hour period. “That’s extraordinary,” McNoldy said.

WFLA-TV meteorologist Jeff Berardelli thinks Melissa is part of an intensification trend fueled, in part, by human-driven climate change.

Ocean warmth fuels storms, and oceans are warmer now than they were in the 20th century.

Berardelli found that the last 22 years (2003-2025) had more than twice the amount of Cat 4 and Cat 5 storms than the previous 22 years (1980-2002).

Going past mountains

One thing that stunned McNoldy when he looked at satellite footage of Melissa nearing Jamaica’s southern coast was that the significant mountains of the island didn’t weaken or put a divot in the storm until after the storm was over land.

The mountains in western Jamaica, where the storm hit, range from 600 feet to the 4,839-foot Mount Horeb.

“Mountains should interrupt the surface circulation,” said McNoldy. “Even if Jamaica were flat it should have had an impact, like asymmetries in the storm. And that just didn’t happen.” The storm maintained its pristine form. That “blows my mind,” he wrote on Bluesky.

What blows my mind about this is that #Melissa doesn’t even notice that there’s a large mountainous island right next to it. It’s like the map outline was drawn on there arbitrarily.

— Brian McNoldy (@bmcnoldy.bsky.social) 2025-10-28T15:10:55.076Z

Melissa’s ability to collide with mountains and still have 185 mph sustained winds at landfall makes the storm perhaps more impressive.

The other 185 mph storms encountered no mountains. The 1935 Labor Day storm rolled over the flat Florida Keys, and Dorian hit the Bahamas, where there’s scant impediment to the storm’s rotation.

Melissa’s small diameter likely helped. Wide storms hit obstacles earlier, while narrower storms can approach closer before being compromised, McNoldy said.

“With really compact storms, they’re more prone to extremes. They can go really, really crazy and intensify, or with the first hint of vertical wind shear, they get upset and weaken. In this case there was no wind shear.”

Deep hot water

Berardelli calculated that the surface water under Melissa was about 4 degrees hotter than it would have been around 100 years ago. “That’s huge!” he wrote on X. “That extra heat powers a higher horse power engine with heavier wind & rain.”

But depth is what gave Melissa real staying power. McNoldy said one of the reasons Melissa was able to stay at a Category 5 for 30 hours was because of the deep hot water south of Jamaica at the time.

Hurricanes cause ocean upwelling as their spinning pulls water up from the depths.

If a storm is moving fast, say 25 mph, it’s constantly encountering new hot surface water, which fuels the storm’s power.

If a storm is moving slowly, like Melissa, which was traveling at 3 mph, it can pull up cold water, which weakens the storm.

Hurricanes need waters of at least 78 F to develop. McNoldy crunched the numbers and found that the waters south of Jamaica were at least 78 F all the way down to depths of 393 feet — the water that Melissa pulled up to the surface was warm enough to keep the storm strong if not make it stronger.

“It was over very high ocean heat content, so it could just sit there and not upwell cooler water,” said McNoldy.

Incredible view of a C-130 Hurricane Hunter flying into Hurricane Melissa. pic.twitter.com/SBY0gcTptz

— Turbine Traveller (@Turbinetraveler) October 28, 2025

The perfect storm

The hurricane hunter aircraft that flew into Melissa’s eye before it made landfall in Jamaica took video of the beast of a storm, and it looked almost like a sculpture, as if it had been spun on a pottery wheel.

“If you could ever pick a hurricane hunter flight to be on, it would be into a Category 5 during the daytime,” said McNoldy. “It would be really amazing. At that point, Category 5 storms have achieved perfection.”