Hurricane Melissa, the 11th named storm of the 2025 Hurricane Season, is now undergoing a rapid intensification phase after reaching category one strength Saturday afternoon (October 25), on a path that takes it directly towards Jamaica.

The Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC), in its latest advisory as at 2:00 pm EDT, located Melissa’s centre near latitude 16.6 North, longitude 75.2 West—or roughly 230 kilometres southeast of Kingston.

Churning slowly at two kilometres/hour in the warm waters of the central Caribbean, the hurricane is packing maximum sustained winds near 120 kilometres/hour, with higher gusts.

Hurricane-force winds extend outward up to 55 kilometres from the eye, while tropical-storm-force winds extend outward up to 205 kilometres.

On the forecast track, the centre of Melissa is expected to move near or over Jamaica during the weekend, lingering into the new week, then she could be near or over eastern Cuba by the middle of next week.

Long before Melissa makes landfall as the first hurricane to directly slam Jamaica in 37 years (since Hurricane Gilbert), the hurricane would have spent days battering the country with high storm surge, damaging surf conditions, torrential rain and gusty winds. Projections currently estimate Melissa’s eye to emerge off Jamaica’s north coast next Tuesday, as the system drastically weakens from major hurricane intensity.

A hurricane warning remains in effect for Jamaica, while a hurricane watch and tropical storm warning are activated for the southwestern peninsula of Haiti from the border with the Dominican Republic to Port-au-Prince.

NHC meteorologists project Hurricane Melissa to bring rainfall totals of 15 to 25 inches to portions of southern Hispaniola and Jamaica into Wednesday, with local maxima of 35 inches possible across eastern
Jamaica and the Tiburon Peninsula of Haiti.

“Additional heavy rainfall is likely beyond Wednesday, but exact storm totals are still uncertain. Catastrophic flash flooding and landslides are expected across southwestern Haiti and portions of Jamaica, with the possibility of catastrophic flood impacts also extending across the remainder of southern Haiti into the southern Dominican Republic,” the NHC warned.