how wide is hurricane melissa
Hurricane Melissa was roughly 700–720 miles wide at its largest , when you include its outer rain bands, and about 240–400 miles across if you focus on the main wind field.
Basic size details
- A Detroit TV weather analysis put Hurricane Melissa’s overall diameter, including outer bands, at about 719 miles as it approached Jamaica in late October 2025.
- A USA Today analysis of National Hurricane Center data estimated the tropical-storm-force wind field at an average of about 247 miles in diameter and the hurricane-force wind field at about 52 miles in diameter.
Eye and core vs whole storm
- The eye of Hurricane Melissa was very small compared with the whole system, estimated at roughly 5–10 miles wide , which is typical of very intense, compact cores.
- Meteorologists noted that while the eye was tiny, the broader cloud and wind shield likely made the storm close to 400 miles across in many satellite views, even before counting the farthest outer bands.
How that compares in real-world terms
- A 700‑mile-wide storm is wide enough to cover all of Michigan plus parts of several neighboring U.S. states at once, as one visualization showed by placing Melissa’s disk over the Great Lakes region.
- That means if the center were over, say, central Florida, tropical-storm-force conditions could extend across multiple states simultaneously , underscoring why Melissa drew so much attention in late 2025.
TL;DR: If you’re asking “how wide is Hurricane Melissa,” the clearest single number is that at peak it was about 720 miles across including its outer bands , with a much smaller (5–10 mile) eye at the center.
Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.