Hurricane Melissa Is the Third Category 5 Storm This Year—That’s Only Happened Once Before

Hurricane Melissa swirls in the Caribbean Sea, as seen by the GOES-19 weather satellite operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Colorado State University/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

As it bears down on Jamaica, Hurricane Melissa has become the third Category 5 storm of the 2025 Atlantic season—just the second season on record to ever see more than two Category 5 hurricanes.

The only other Atlantic season to achieve this feat was the blockbuster one of 2005, which featured four Category 5 storms: Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

Hurricanes are categorized on the Saffir-Simpson scale based on their wind speeds: a storm becomes a Category 1 when its winds reach 74 miles per hour and a Category 5 when they reach 157 mph.

Category 5 storms are rare—Melissa is only the 45th Category 5 in the Atlantic Ocean on record since 1851. These storms require a perfect alignment of prodigious available energy and conducive atmospheric conditions to reach and sustain such powerful wind speeds.

Melissa was able to reach its 175-mph maximum wind speed by taking advantage of exceptionally warm waters in the Caribbean Sea. It underwent extreme rapid intensification, strengthening from a 70-mph tropical storm last Saturday morning to a 140-mph Category 4 hurricane on Sunday—twice the rate of the official threshold of rapid intensification. (The storm strengthened further later on Sunday and again on Monday.) That level of strengthening “is on the fringes of what’s ever been observed in the Atlantic basin,” wrote meteorologist Michael Lowry on his blog.

With rising ocean temperatures, more storms are expected to undergo such rapid intensification and to intensify at faster rates. In a changing climate, hurricanes are also becoming stronger overall—one study found that climate change amplified the winds of every hurricane in 2024. That trend means more storms will reach the higher categories than they used to. A 2020 study, for instance, found that the proportion of tropical cyclones that reach Category 3 or higher has already grown in recent decades.

There have been seven Category 5 storms in the past three years and 13 in the past decade, wrote weather writer Dennis Mersereau on Bluesky.

Editor’s Note (10/27/25): This article was edited after posting to update Hurricane Melissa's wind speed.