Hurricane Melissa though yet to make landfall in Jamaica underwent extreme rapid intensification on Monday, strengthening from a category 4 to a category 5 with winds of up to 175mph.
Melissa, now set to be the strongest storm on the planet this year and the worst storm to hit Jamaica in decades, started as a tropical storm on Saturday before exploding to a category 4 on Sunday.
Its winds escalated from 70mph to 140mph making it one of the fastest intensifications on record in the Atlantic Ocean.
So far, three people have died in Jamaica as the National Hurricane Center warns of catastrophic coniditions including storm surges, winds and significant infrastructural damage.
Scientists say Melissa is the fourth storm in the Atlantic this year to undergo rapid intensification, pointing to human induced climate crisis which warms the oceans as a potential cause.
Establishing a direct link between human induced climate crisis and the dynamic nature and intensity of Hurricane Melissa is complicated.
While not directly responsible for its cause, certain results of climate change can give rise to the storm's rapid evolution from a tropical storm to a category 5 Hurricane with the latest reported windspeeds of 180mph.
Dr Emily Vosper, a Senior Research Associate in Climate Extremes from the University of Bristol said, "In the Caribbean, severe rainfall hurricanes, such as Hurricane Maria which hit Puerto Rico in 2017, are twice as likely to occur1 in the 2C warmer world compared to a 1.5C world.
This is driven by the increased water holding capacity of the atmosphere by a rate of 7% per 1C of warming. This relation is known as the Clausius-Clapeyron effect and is observed in extreme rainfall. Hurricanes such as Melissa will therefore carry more rainfall than pre-industrial times as a result of climate change." she said.
Vosper added that Hurricane Melissa is particularly hazardous due to its slow-moving nature known as "stalling" which means that the windspeed and power will cause a great volume of destruction as it moves slowly through Jamaica.
In addition, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their latest assessment report, concluded that "the proportion of Category 4–5 Tropical Cyclones will very likely increase globally with warming".
This means that the frequency of intense hurricanes will continue to increase as the world gets warmer.
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