Hurricane Milton on Monday added its name to the rare list of Category 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin, as did Beryl from earlier this season.

Category 5 hurricanes occupy the most elite status in the Atlantic basin. A hundred years of history has shown that they have preferred locations and times, but there are also outliers, especially in recent years.

Milton and Beryl are the newest members: Milton became a Category 5 at 11:55 a.m. EDT on Monday, joining Michael as of 2018 as the second Gulf of Mexico hurricane to reach this intensity in October since satellite detection of storms began in 1966, according to Dr. Phil Klotzbach, a tropical scientist at Colorado State University.

Earlier this season, Beryl became the record-earliest Category 5 of any Atlantic hurricane season on the evening of July 1, 2024. Beryl surpassed 2005’s Hurricane Emily – the previous earliest Cat. 5 – by as much as 15 days. That was just one of many early season records that Beryl shattered.

Category 5 is the highest classification a hurricane can reach: Maximum sustained winds of 155 mph or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale are needed for a hurricane to reach this intensity. If you’re more familiar with the EF scale for tornadoes, that corresponds to the estimated winds in an EF3 tornado or stronger.

Before Milton and Beryl, there had been only 40 such Cat 5 hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin since 1924, according to NOAA’s historical database.

It is even rarer to have two Category 5 storms in a season: Only five other seasons in the Atlantic Basin have produced two or more Category 5 hurricanes since 1950, Klotzbach said in a post on X.

The most recent year was 2019, when Dorian and Lorenzo reached that power. 2005 had the most with four, including Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.

There have been ten Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes since 2016: In addition to Beryl and Milton, this latest wave of Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes also includes Lee in 2023, Ian in 2022, Dorian and Lorenzo in 2019, Michael in 2018, Maria and Irma in 2017 and Matthew in 2016.

That four-year streak from 2016 through 2019 with at least one Category 5 hurricane was the longest on record.

There have also been long “droughts”: Before 2016’s Matthew, the Atlantic had eight consecutive hurricane seasons without a Category 5. Hurricanes Allen and Gilbert were separated by an eight-year period, from 1980 to 1988.

They are most common during the peak of hurricane season: Category 5 hurricanes have occurred by far the most often in September. But they also happened at least half a dozen times in August and October.

This includes the most active period of the hurricane season. That’s because any favorable conditions and ingredients for development will most likely overlap across much of the Atlantic basin.

This is where they are most common in the Atlantic Ocean: The map below shows in red segments the locations where hurricanes have reached Category 5 intensity, including Hurricane Beryl early this season.

Aside from the oddity of Hurricane Lorenzo in 2019 in the far eastern Atlantic Ocean, you’ll find that almost all of them occur in the same general area, from the southwestern Atlantic Ocean north of the Lesser Antilles to the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. .

These areas are so conducive to strengthening because they have a supply of deep, warm ocean water, have no hostile wind gusts in the heart of hurricane season, and have a series of disturbances known as tropical waves that serve as seeds for development. The supply of deep, warm ocean water that fuels hurricanes is highest in the Atlantic basin in these areas, particularly in the Caribbean Sea.

Hurricanes do not maintain Category 5 intensity for long: On average, a hurricane maintains Category 5 status for just under 24 hours.

That’s because intense hurricanes typically undergo one or more eyewall replacement cycles. During one, the hurricane’s intense ring of thunderstorms around its eye is surrounded by a new outer ring.

When that happens, the hurricane’s wind intensity temporarily decreases as the former eyewall is smothered. It usually intensifies again as the new outer eye wall is pulled inward, leading to a larger hurricane.

Several Category 5 hurricanes reached that intensity several times during their lifetimes.

Hurricanes Allen (1980), Isabel (2003) and Ivan (2004) each reached Category 5 intensity three times during their journey.

Hurricane Cuba of November 1932 (78 hours) and Hurricane Irma of 2007 (77 hours) spent the longest combined time at Category 5 strength, according to NOAA’s database.

Only four recorded hurricanes have made landfall on the continental US at Category 5 intensity: The most recent of these was Hurricane Michael in the Florida Panhandle in October 2018.

The others include Andrew in 1992 in South Florida, Camille in 1969 on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane in the Florida Keys.

Hurricane Ian almost did that in 2022, but descended into a still-intense Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall.

Chris Dolce has been a senior meteorologist at Weather.com for more than 10 years after starting his career at The Weather Channel in the early 2000s.

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at Weather.com and has been an incurable weather buff since a tornado narrowly missed his childhood home in Wisconsin when he was 7 years old. Contact him at X (formerly Twitter), Facebook and Wires.