Meteorologists were glued to their computers on Monday morningroyal circle club, watching virtual data as the Air Force Reserve Hurricane Hunter airplane made pass after pass through the eye of Hurricane Milton. Every time it did, it found the storm’s pressure had dropped and the eyewall wind speeds had increased, indicating that it was becoming more intense by the minute.

The hurricane went from a Category 1 storm at midnight to a Category 5 hurricane by noon. And it didn’t stop there.

By 8 p.m. on Monday, the storm’s maximum sustained wind speeds had increased to 180 miles per hour, making Milton one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever. Based on wind speed, it joined a handful of other hurricanes to rival the strongest Atlantic storm ever recorded: a 1980 hurricane named Allen, which had a peak wind speed of 190 m.p.h. before it made landfall along the United States-Mexico border.

Hurricane Milton’s wind speeds intensified from 60 m.p.h. to 180 m.p.h. in only 36 hours, among the fastest intensifications on record.

Source: National Hurricane Center hurricane database

As a small, compact system, however, Milton was more similar to Hurricane Wilma in 2005, which holds the record for the lowest pressure in a hurricane, another measure of a storm’s intensity.

Its small size, an excess of extremely warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico and calm atmospheric conditions allowed Milton to “explosively” intensify, as hurricane center forecasters noted Monday afternoon.

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