In 2021, the National Hurricane Center made its boldest prediction to date at 11 a.m. on Aug. 26 when it forecast an embryonic tropical depression would rapidly intensify to near Cat 3 strength.
Rapid intensification — defined as a harrowing ascent in wind speeds of at least 35 mph in 24 hours — was rarely predicted at the time, and the forecast for what would become Hurricane Ida was a feat so daring it was heralded at the next year’s National Hurricane Conference.
Four years later, NHC experts confidently and aggressively predicted Hurricane Melissa would detonate from a sloshy tropical storm to a 155-mph high-end Category 4 tropical cyclone four days before landfall.
Three days ahead of Melissa’s crushing punch into western Jamaica, the forecast was jacked to a Cat 5. Melissa was a 90-mph Cat 1 at the time of the Cat 5 prediction marking the first time the NHC had forecast that kind of explosive strength would come from such a low intensity system.
Melissa, whose fury caused a NOAA Hurricane Hunter plane to exceed its G-force limitations, made landfall Oct. 28 with 185 mph winds.
It was the strongest hurricane on record to hit Jamaica, tying 2019’s Dorian and the 1936 Labor Day Hurricane for landfalling muscle.
And it set a new benchmark for forecast bravado, which was showcased at the 2026 National Hurricane Conference in Orlando March 30 to April 2.
“Being able to make these forecasts during Melissa was pretty outstanding,” said Dan Brown, chief of the NHC’s hurricane specialists unit. “We forecast a tropical storm to a Cat 4 hurricane, which was something we didn’t do five to 10 years ago.”
Brown made the 2021 forecast on Ida that was a landmark at the time. As a supervisor he has fewer forecasting hourse but said the Melissa forecast to a Cat 5 followed a “long conversation.”
“We felt pretty comfortable making that forecast,” he said.
Forecasting rapid intensification for hurricanes has been a huge success
Rapid intensification is one of the more chilling aspects to hurricane forecasting, especially if it occurs near a coastline that may be bracing for a lesser storm.
But in the last 15 years NHC’s intensity forecast errors during rapid intensification events have been reduced by 50%.
Brown said the improvements have come with a better understanding of the causes of rapid intensification and what conditions can increase the chances it will occur. Better technology has also been introduced with higher resolution models.
And in 2025, Google DeepMind artificial intelligence contributed to forecast accuracy.
How Google DeepMind artificial intelligence fared forecasting hurricanes
Google DeepMind appears on forecast model graphics as GDMN. It was the best performing model during the 2025 hurricane season and outperformed the NHC on Hurricane Melissa, according to a review by Andy Hazelton, an associate scientist at the University of Miami’s Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies.
Hazelton said Google DeepMind’s forecast performance was “extremely promising.”
The 2025 hurricane season, which ended with three Category 5 hurricanes, was the first time the NHC incorporated Google DeepMind in its forecasts.
“We threw out the American model (GFS) because it wasn’t initializing correctly during Melissa,” said NHC hurricane specialist Larry Kelly specifically about the Melissa forecast. “The NHC outperformed every model except Google DeepMind.”
Kelly was the lead author on the postmortem report on Melissa. He spoke during the National Hurricane Conference in Orlando about the storm, whose peak 190 mph winds tied 1980’s Hurricane Allen for the highest wind speeds in the Atlantic basin.
But Melissa had humble origins. It started as a tropical wave off Africa on Oct. 13 and was introduced as an area to watch three days later.
On the day before landfall, a device that measures wind speed, pressure and humidity called a dropsonde was released into the gaping center of Melissa. Milky mesovortices like whirlpools in a stream spun ominously in its eye.
Data came back with a minimum central pressure of 893 millibars, indicating a fantastically strong storm.
Hurricane Wilma holds the record for the most intense storm in the Atlantic basin with a pressure of 882 millibars.
Hurricane Melissa was one of three Cat 5 storms during 2025 season
“We said, ‘Oh, wow,’” Kelly said about seeing the low pressure reading in Melissa. “We were in the midst of a record-setting event in the Atlantic.”
Melissa would deepen to 892 millibars before landfall.
Jonathan Belles, a digital meteorologist with The Weather Channel, said in an online column that NHC intensity errors overall last year were above the 5-year-averge, but part of the challenge was the high number of rapid intensification events — 23 — that occurred during the 2025 season.
Belles said rapid intensification events made up 10% of all forecasts, “a much higher proportion than in an average season.”
“Overall, there has been a general decrease in errors over the last couple of decades,” Belles said.
Into the early 1990s, hurricane intensity models were based on climatology — what previous storms did when in a similar place at a similar time.Then models started incorporating pieces of real-time information to make predictions for a specific hurricane. Increasingly refined information from satellites, ocean buoys, weather balloons, ships at sea, hurricane hunters and dropsondes is fed to the models, which are seeing more slices of the atmosphere at higher resolutions.
Now, artificial intelligence is a key part of a hurricane forecast
Brown said the intensity forecasts for Melissa allowed the NHC to give earlier, and increasingly dire, warnings to Jamaica.
On Oct. 28 at 10 a.m., one message read “Last chance to protect your life.”
Melissa killed at least 45 people in Jamaica, turned wooden structures to sticks, pried roofs from buildings, stripped bark from trees, scoured paint from walls and left more than 1.25 million livestock animals dead.
After the storm’s initial malice, Leptospirosis took more lives as sanitation systems broke and bacterial infections spread.
Melissa delivered the tumult predicted.
“We were the most aggressive with the rapid intensification forecast with exceptionally long lead times and that’s something the NHC hasn’t done in the past,” Kelly said. “It shows the substantial progress we’ve made.”
Kimberly Miller is a journalist for the USA TODAY NETWORK FLORIDA. She covers weather, the environment and critters as the Embracing Florida reporter. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@pbpost.com. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at palmbeachpost.com/newsletters.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Forecasters have a new secret weapon for predicting major hurricanes
Reporting by Kimberly Miller, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
