Meteorologists were glued to their computers on Monday morning, 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 pressure had dropped and the eyewall wind speeds had increased, indicating that the storm was becoming more intense by the minute.

The hurricane went from a staggering 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 joins 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.

As a small, compact system, however, Milton is 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.

The 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 in an early afternoon update on Monday.

The standard meteorological definition of rapid intensification is 30 knots in 24 hours, or roughly 35 miles per hour daily. Milton increased by more than double this definition on Monday, at a pace similar to that of Wilma and another record storm, Hurricane Felix in 2007.