What can we expect from Melissa?
- October 24, 2025
- 0 Comments
- By Story/Photos By Bryan - SurfGuru
Tropical storm Melissa is still hanging out in the Caribbean Sea just SE of Jamaica and is forecast to continue west either passing over or just south of the Island nation while building into a Major Hurricane on Sunday. It should start to hook up towards Cuba either very late on Monday or early on Tuesday. The Islands in it's path are expected to take heavy damage from this strom from flooding and strong winds.
The GFS and Euro models are both shifting the storm a little further east into the Atlantic after the hook. Ii it exits the Islands on Tuesday, as predicted by the GFSit will hook north much further out in the Atlantic due to the pull of an area of low pressure that will be coming off of the Carolinas early next week and the push of the area of high pressure behind it. This would drag it up into the Atlantic similar to what happened to Imelda and following the final track of most of the storms this season. This could bring us smaller surf than what we usually see from a storm swell with the strong east winds countering the swell shown in the figure below.
Below is the GFS projected location of Melissa at 12am on 10/30.jpg.aspx "Melissa-GFS-10-24-(1).jpg")
If the storm slows down over the weekend and doesn’t exit the Islands until later in the mid week we could see favorable winds and bigger conditions as the Carolinas low will be further away and have less of a pull on Melissa allowing it to pass a little closer, about 600 miles off of the Florida coast. This would bring us a more traditions storm swell for next weekend with favorable winds.
Below is the EURO model projected location of Melissa on Friday at 5pm on 10/31 
If the strom continues on the path expected by the Euro model we would see the best case surf senario of a long period swell with light winds on Sat 11/01..jpg.aspx "Melissa-Euro-Sat-10-24-(1).jpg")
As always I will be monitoring the path of the storm, especially now that Melissa is forecast to become a major hurricane Sunday evening. These big storms tend to move in ways that the models may not predict so stay tunned and check on the latest at the National Hurricane Center at https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/.