Most intense hurricane

The most intense hurricane ever recorded is Hurricane Patricia, a Category 5 Pacific hurricane that formed on 20 October 2015 and dissipated only four days later. On 23 October, a US Air Force reconnaissance aircraft recorded the air pressure inside the eye as 872 mbar (26.75 inHg; typical atmospheric pressure is around 1,013 mbar/29.9 inHg) and maximum sustained wind speeds of around 185 knots (343 km/h; 213 mph). This record has been confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization.

inHg stands for "Inches of Mercury", a unit used for barometric pressure in weather reports, refrigeration and aviation in the USA.

This beats the record established by Hurricane Wilma (2005), which had a low pressure centre of 882 mbar (26.05 inHg) and wind speeds of 325 km/h (200 mph), though Wilma still holds the record for an Atlantic hurricane.

Patricia made landfall on 23 October, hitting the Mexican coast about 220 km (136 mi) south-east of Gaudalajara. Luckily it missed the area’s major population centres, passing between the (largely evacuated) towns of Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta and into a mostly uninhabited rural area. As a result, the impact of the hurricane was fairly light, with only six fatalities and around 5.4 billion pesos ($323.3 million; £210.2 million) in property damage.

Tropical cyclones are storm systems that form over large bodies of warm water in the tropics before moving towards cooler waters in curving, erratic paths, often growing in intensity as they travel. Cyclones that form in the Atlantic or eastern Pacific are known as hurricanes while ones that form in the western Pacific are known as typhoons. Those that form in the Indian Ocean and around Australia are just called cyclones.