When Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica last week it was one of the strongest recorded hurricanes in the Atlantic at 185 miles per hour. For perspective, Hurricane Gilbert in 1980 tops the record at 190 miles per hour.
A recent study conducted by the Imperial College in London England, using an Imperial College Storm Model called IRIS, found that climate warming increased Hurricane Melissa’s speed by 7 percent and that “it is unlikely that Melissa would have happened without climate change.”
IRIS is a model that runs simulations on a storm’s wind speed, comparing and calculating the speed of a storm in a pre-industrial climate versus a modern climate. The IRIS model creates millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks to map out a hurricane at each stage and track its strength.
This model takes into consideration the impact of rising global temperatures. Prior to the innovative IRIS model, it was difficult to measure the impact of rising temperatures on tropical cyclones due to the scarcity of data since few hurricanes make landfall each year. Rising global temperatures lead to warmer ocean waters, which fuel tropical storms.
IRIS can also be used to model the return period for a hurricane in a location, and found that in pre-industrial times, the return period for a storm with Hurricane Melissa’s strength was once every 8,1000 years, dropping to once every 1,7000 years. Thus, the model found that a storm of Melissa’s magnitude was essentially “about four times more likely in the 2025 climate compared to a pre-industrial baseline.”
Overall, this case study of Hurricane Melissa highlights how climate factors such as rising ocean temperatures can impact hurricane intensity and frequency and underscores the importance of continued research into how changing climate conditions can affect extreme weather patterns.
More on IRIS can be found here.
Read the full study here.