It's official: No storm on record, anywhere on the globe, has maintained winds 185mph or above for as long as #Irma https://t.co/34Z8V7PXFs pic.twitter.com/X8ENs0TCxM
— CNN (@CNN) September 7, 2017
The intense winds of Hurricane Irma have left a trail of devastation in their wake with targets like South Florida still in its sights. Evidence of Irma’s power has been more than ample and now the storm is officially breaking records courtesy of its hellish attributes.
USA Today reports that the still-in-progress storm has already busted a number of records. Colorado State University meteorologist Phil Klotzbach has been keeping track of Irma’s ferocity and found that the maintained power of the hurricane has smashed past marks. With sustained winds of 185 mph for 37 hours, Irma is now the longest lasting tropical cyclone of that intensity in recorded world history. The speed of the wind clocks in as the highest on record in the Atlantic Ocean if you don’t include the Caribbean Sea or the Gulf of Mexico into the figures.
Irma is also massive in other metrics too. The storm’s barometric pressure is the lowest of any Atlantic hurricane excluding the Carribean Sea of Gulf of Mexico and has generated the most accumulated cyclone energy (or ACE) by a tropical cyclone in the tropical Atlantic. Klotzbach’s findings indicate that Irma generated more ACE than “the first eight named storms of this Atlantic hurricane season (Arlene-Harvey) combined.”
At present, Hurricane Irma is still something that’s being braced for in the U.S. With the storm’s run of wreckage and immense size that simply dwarfs Hurricane Andrew, there’s no shortage of reasons for caution.