rapidly

Oct. 24 (UPI) — Melissa intensified into near-hurricane strength and is forecast to rapidly increase this weekend into a possible Category 5 storm with life-threatening and catastrophic flash flooding and landslides through portions of southern Hispaniola and Jamaica.

Melissa rose to maximum sustained winds of 70 mph and was moving east-southeast at 1 mph, the National Hurricane Center said in its 11 a.m. EDT update. Melisa would be designated as a hurricane with winds of at least 74 mph

Melissa was about 155 miles southeast of Kingston, Jamaica, and about 235 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

“The exceptionally warm waters, reaching hundreds of feet deep, will act like jet fuel – providing extra energy for Melissa,” AccuWeather Lead Hurricane Expert Alex DaSilva said about Melissa. “The warmest water in the Atlantic basin is in the central Caribbean, in the direct path of this storm. Rapid intensification into a Category 5 hurricane is not out of the question this weekend.”

A hurricane warning was in effect for Jamaica and a hurricane watch for the southwestern peninsula of Haiti from the border with the Dominican Republic to Port-Au-Prince.

“Melissa is still expected to make landfall in Jamaica as an upper-end Category 4 hurricane, which could be the strongest direct landfall for the island in since tropical cyclone record keeping has been made in the Atlantic Basin,” NHC forecaster Philippe said in a discussion.

A turn to the north and northeast is forecast on Monday and Tuesday.

Melissa is forecast to become a hurricane later Saturday and a major hurricane by Sunday.

On the forecast track, Melissa is expected to move near or over Jamaica through early next week, and it could be near or over eastern Cuba by the middle of next week.

“Unfortunately, a large majority of the latest reliable track models show Melissa making landfall on Jamaica in about 72 hours,” NHC forecaster Robbie Berg said. “What’s most concerning here is that the island is likely to experience a couple of days of heavy rainfall and tropical-storm-force winds before the core — and strongest winds — even reach the coast.”

Berg said major hurricane strength is likely when it reaches eastern Cuba “but increased shear should lead to weakening below major hurricane strength by day 5.”

Tropical-force winds stretch outward to 115 mph from the center.

Rainfall of 15 to 25 inches through Sunday is forecast to portions of southern Hispaniola and Jamaica through Tuesday with local maximum 35 inches possible across the Tiburon Peninsula of Haiti, the NHC said.

Eastern Cuba is expected to receive rainfall of 4 to 8 inches, with local amounts up to 12 into Tuesday.

Additional rainfall is likely beyond Tuesday in all the areas, NHC said.

Minor coastal flooding is likely along the south coast of Jamaica later in the weekend or early next week, NHC said. Peak storm surge could reach 5 to 10 feet above ground level near and to the east of where Melissa makes landfall, NHC said.

“This storm surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves,” NHC said.

Swells are also expected to affect portions of Hispaniola, Jamaica and eastern Cuba during the next several days.

Melissa is the 13th named storm of the season, and it’s the first in the Caribbean.

This season has seen few storms, which have warmed the Caribbean Sea, and the warm water is potential fuel for stronger and more dangerous storms.

In the latest instance of the war in Ukraine spilling over into neighboring countries, officials in Estonia say a Ukrainian one-way attack drone exploded inside that Baltic nation about 50 miles west of the border with Russia. They blamed Russian jamming for sending the drone off course, likely during an attack on a Russian gas processing plant near St. Petersburg. 

While there have been previous incidents of attack drones flying into neighboring nations, this appears to be the first publicly known case of a Ukrainian drone entering a non-combatant’s airspace since a Tu-141 jet-powered one flew into Croatia in March 2022. In addition, aside from raising concerns about collateral damage, the Estonian drone incident highlights worries about how electronic warfare is affecting civilian aviation and communications.

A farmer found pieces of a drone and a crater in his field and called authorities, the head of Estonia’s Internal Security Service (ISS) told reporters Tuesday morning. There were no injuries or major property damage, however Estonian authorities warned that if the drone hit a residential building, the consequences could have been far more severe. Destruction of civilian buildings and infrastructure and resulting loss of life is a frequent occurrence in Ukraine.

“Based on very preliminary data, we estimate that the drone came down already in the early hours of Sunday, around 4 a.m. to 5 a.m.,” ISS Director General Margo Palloson told reporters on Tuesday, according to the official Estonian ERR news. “We have reason to believe that this may be a Ukrainian drone that was [targeting] inland Russian sites but was diverted from its course by Russia’s GPS jamming and other electronic warfare measures, causing it to veer into Estonian airspace. At this time, there is nothing to indicate that it could be a Russian drone.”

Russia “is using very strong GPS jamming and spoofing near our borders,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told the Estonian Postimees newspaper. “As a result, one day a drone ends up in Lithuania, the next day in Latvia, and now one has reached Estonia. These objects fly at very low altitudes to avoid detection by Russia, and that’s precisely why they are difficult to detect.”

Also on Sunday, another drone crashed into the Russian side of Lake Peipus, a large body of water separating eastern Estonia and western Russia, Estonian officials said. That same day, Ukraine carried out a drone attack on the Novatek gas processing complex. Located in the port of Ust-Luga, this is Russia’s largest liquefied gas producer, located about 20 miles from the Estonian border. Video emerged from the scene showing an explosion followed by a massive fire that is still burning.

You can see the results of that attack in the following video.

Speaking at the press conference, Pevkur said these incidents highlight the need for sensors that can detect low-flying drones.

“Can this create full blanket coverage?” he asked rhetorically. “Theoretically, yes — it depends on how many resources we put into it. Our capabilities will improve significantly. Whether it will be 100 percent coverage, time will tell. At the same time, the war in Ukraine shows that 100 percent coverage does not exist anywhere.”

Estonia’s Prime Minister Kristen Michal called for a “layered air defense” to prevent further incursions. While neither official offered specifics about what these sensors and defenses would be, a layered defense can help plug surveillance gaps, but the most effective way of surveilling for low and slow-flying drones, as well as other low-flying aircraft, is by providing persistent look-down radar capabilities. Airborne early warning and control aircraft can provide this but keeping one airborne continuously is extremely resource intensive. Poland is working to build a network of aerostats that carry look-down radars. They are designed to detect low-flying drones, as well as aircraft and cruise missiles. You can read more about that in our story here.

Last week, Polish officials said a suspected Russian drone crashed into a cornfield near the village of Osiny, about 60 miles southeast of Warsaw. 

Polish Gen. Dariusz Malinowski, deputy commander of Armed Forces Operational Command, said it was a military drone propelled by a Chinese-produced engine, according to The Guardian. As we have previously reported, Chinese engines are a basic component of many Russian drones.

“I’ll say one thing that is certain: Russia will never admit to this,” said Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz. “Just as it hasn’t admitted to any of the eight incidents in Moldova, three incidents in Romania, three in Lithuania, two in Latvia, or the one drone incident in Bulgaria.”

Meanwhile, frequent missile and drone attacks by Russia have led to multiple instances of NATO jets scrambling in response.

While this appears to be the first time a Ukrainian drone went off course into a non-combatant’s territory in more than three years, an errant Ukrainian air defense munition was suspected of killing two in Poland in 2022.

Beyond having errant weapons landing on neighboring countries, Ukraine’s drone campaign on Russia is playing havoc with civil aviation there. The latest example took place Sunday, when a passenger plane carrying Russians heading to St. Petersburg was forced to make an emergency landing in Estonia early Sunday morning due to the aforementioned Ukrainian drone attack, Postimees reported.

“The aircraft was rerouted to land in Tallinn, as it could not land at Pulkovo Airport due to a temporary closure,” Margot Holts, head of Communications and Marketing at Tallinn Airport, told the publication. The aircraft, operated by Egyptian carrier AlMasria Universal Airlines, had departed from Sharm El Sheikh and landed in Tallinn at 5:33 a.m. local time. It was able to continue its journey to St. Petersburg nearly six hours later.

The suspected Ukrainian drone crash also raises the specter of another major problem affecting countries outside the war zone. European governments have repeatedly accused Moscow of jamming GPS in recent years. The issue has been so concerning that last month, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) warned that Russian GPS jamming and other commercially-used signals near the Baltic Sea posed a “serious threat” to civilian aviation, especially in Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Finland and Sweden.

In addition, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Luxembourg and Ukraine filed complaints last year after Russian interference reportedly “disrupted air traffic control systems and hijacked television broadcasts, including children’s programming, replacing them with war propaganda,” according to the Moscow Times.

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a member of the UN, “demanded that Russia stop interfering with the satellite systems of European countries,” the publication reported. The ITU blamed “ground stations located in the areas of Moscow, Kaliningrad and Pavlovka” and demanded that Russia immediately cease its actions and investigate the incidents.

As we previously reported, last year, U.K. authorities confirmed that a Royal Air Force Dassault 900LX business jet transporting Grant Shapps, at the time the U.K. defense secretary, experienced GPS jamming while flying near Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave.

From our story at the time: “It’s critical to note that GPS jamming can be executed over a broad area. So it is difficult to ascertain with any degree of certainty whether Shapps’ aircraft was specifically targeted and the U.K. has offered no evidence that directly points to that being the case. Still, its flight path would have been easily tracked via Russian radar and visible on flight-tracking websites.

It has also been pointed out that a very large number of other aircraft — some 511 according to open-source intelligence analyst Markus Jonsson — were also jammed on the same day in the region. Jonsson has also questioned the likelihood of jammers being directed against individual planes in a targeted fashion.”

All this comes as both Russia and Ukraine are doing everything they possibly can to produce as many long-range standoff attack weapons as possible. This also includes developing missiles and drones with increasing range and payloads. As we recently reported, Ukraine’s new Flamingo ground-launched long-range cruise missile is said to have a range of 1,864 miles (3,000 kilometers) and a warhead weighing 2,535 pounds (1,150 kilograms). That would make Flamingo a much farther-reaching and more destructive weapon than any missile or one-way-attack drone available to Ukraine now.

Russia, too, is making advances in its missile and drone technology. 

The goal to all this is to ratchet-up the pace of long-range cross-border attacks. This snowballing race to field newer, deadlier and longer-reaching weapons and strike more frequently will only raise the risk of munitions straying into neighboring countries, and the possibility that a major inadvertent destructive event could add new volatility to the conflict.

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Aug. 16 (UPI) — Hurricane Erin is now a Category 5 storm, the highest on the class, rapidly intensifying overnight into early Saturday morning as it threatens the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico, then will move along the U.S. East Coast.

In an update at 11:20 a.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center reported an Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter aircraft showed maximum sustained winds of 160 mph, which passes the 157 mph minimum for Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

In the NHC’s 2:00pm update, Erin remained a Category 5 storm with 160 mph after rapidly intensifying from a 75 mph-Category 1 storm on Friday morning to a 155 mph-Category 4 at the 11 a.m. advisory on Saturday morning.

The storm was located approximately 110 miles north of Anguilla and about 205 miles east-northeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico, and was traveling west at 16 mph.

The northern Leeward Islands include Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Martin, St. Barts, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Montserrat.

A tropical storm watch remains for St. Martin and St. Barthelemy, and Sint Maarten. Hurricane-force winds extend up to 30 miles from the center and tropical-force outward to 140 miles.

The storm is expected to skirt the Leeward Islands and Puerto Rico on Sunday rather than hit them directly, which could bring strong winds and up to 6 inches of rain through the day Saturday.

“Locally considerable flash and urban flooding, along with landslides or mudslides, are possible,” NHC said, in addition to the possibility of swells.

“Swells generated by Erin will affect portions of the northern Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and the Turks and Caicos Islands through the weekend,” the weather service said in its latest update. “These swells will spread to the Bahamas, Bermuda, and the East Coast of the United States early next week.

“These rough ocean conditions will likely cause life-threatening surf and rip currents.”

Forecasters are predicting the storm will make a west-northwest turn Saturday evening, which will come with a “decrease in forward speed,” ahead of an expected northerly early next week.

By Wednesday night, the storm was forecast to be a few hundred miles west of Bermuda and just outside the big tracking cone. Erin then is forecast to travel north hundreds of miles from the East Coast.

Forecasters predict the storm has the potential to affect the U.S. East Coast, including Florida, as well as the Bahamas and Bermuda, next week.

“Erin is expected to produce life-threatening surf and rip currents along the beaches of the Bahamas, much of the East Coast of the U.S., and Atlantic Canada next week,” NHC forecaster Jack Beven said in a discussion.

Erin became the first hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic storm season Friday. Forecasters had been expecting the storm to intensify into a hurricane since early in the week.

There have been four prior Atlantic named storms so far this season. Tropical Storm Chantal caused major flooding in North Carolina but was the only of the four to make landfall in the United States.

The Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1 and ends on Nov. 30. The peak hurricane season goes from mid-August through September and into mid-October. Ninety-three percent of hurricane landfalls along the U.S. Gulf Coast and the East Coast have occurred from August through October, the Weather Channel reported in citing data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Last year at this time, there also had been five named storms.

Aug. 15 (UPI) — Erin became the first hurricane of the 2025 Atlantic season on Friday morning and is forecast to rapidly strengthen as it heads near the Leeward Islands, and later Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

In its 10 a.m. EDT update, the National Hurricane Center said Erin became a hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph — just 2 mph above the tropical storm designation.

In the 7 p.m. update, Erin increased to 85 mph.

Erin was 310 miles east of the Northern Leeward Islands, and was moving west-northwest at 17 mph in warm waters.

The NHC said the motion is expected to continue through the weekend with some decrease in forward speed.

With rapid strengthening the next two to three days, Eric is forecast to become a major hurricane during the weekend with winds at least 111 mph.

On the forecast track, Erin is likely to go just north of the Northern Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico over the weekend. Erin is forecast to reach Category 4 at 130 mph on Monday, the NHC said.

By 2 p.m., Wednesday, the storm was forecast to be a few hundred miles west of Bermuda and outside the big tracking cone.

“While the threat of direct impacts in the Bahamas and along the East coast of the United States appears to be gradually decreasing, there will still be a significant risk of dangerous surf and rip currents along western Atlantic beaches next week,” NHC forecaster Jack Beven wrote in a discussion.

Tropical storm warnings remain in effect for Anguilla St. Martin and St. Barthelemy, Saba and St. Eustatius, and Sint Maarten.

Hurricane-force winds extend up to 75 miles from the center, and tropical-force winds outward to 115 miles.

Marine warnings are in effect for the Atlantic, Caribbean and southwest Atlantic and the southwest North Atlantic.

The NHC said Puerto Rico and the northern Leeward Islands — which include Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Martin, St. Barts, Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Montserrat — should expect heavy rainfall Friday night through Sunday. Rainfall totals of 2 to 4 inches are forecast with isolated totals of 6 inches. It could lead to flash and urban flooding, along with landslides and mudslides.

Swells will begin affecting this area and will spread to the western Atlantic next week.

Wind gusts or tropical storm-force winds are possible in rainbands over portions of the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico this weekend.

“Do not underestimate the power of a major hurricane even passing by offshore,” Alex DaSilva, the lead hurricane expert with AccuWeather, said. “These massive storms produce very rough surf and lethal rip currents that can impact beaches even hundreds of miles away.”

The previous four named Atlantic storms this year were Andrea, Barry, Chantal and Dexter. None of them became hurricanes, and Chantal was the only one to make landfall in the United States, causing significant flooding in North Carolina.

Helene struck that state last year as a tropical storm, causing an estimated $53 billion in damage, after hitting western Florida as a Category 4 hurricane.

Four other hurricanes made landfall in the United States in 2024: Beryl, Debby, Francine and Milton.