On Today’s Date: Hurricane Patricia Smashes Global Wind Record

While most attention is usually paid to Atlantic Basin hurricanes, an Eastern Pacific hurricane set a global and hemispheric record 10 years ago, but then had little impact at landfall.

On Oct. 23, 2015, 10 years ago this morning, Hurricane Patricia reached its peak intensity in the eastern Pacific Ocean about 150 miles southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico.

That it was a Category 5 at the time was attention-grabbing enough.

But taking advantage of much warmer than average ocean water, Patricia’s estimated maximum sustained winds reached 215 mph that morning, the fastest sustained winds of any tropical cyclone anywhere on Earth, according to NOAA’s records.

Its lowest estimated surface pressure of 872 millibars was lower than only one other storm globally, 1979’s Super Typhoon Tip in the Western Pacific Basin (870 mb).

As senior meteorologist Jonathan Belles wrote, a NOAA Hurricane Hunter mission had a harrowing ride through Patricia while it was near maximum strength.

“They went through a rapid change between 3.0G (or three times the force of gravity) and -1.5G (weightlessness) in the eye wall roller coaster,” Belles wrote.

Patricia soon weakened, but still made a Category 4 landfall in southwest Mexico that evening.

But it happened to strike a sparsely populated area of Mexico’s Jalisco state between Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta. While a narrow swath of severe damage and flooding occurred, only two deaths were directly related to the hurricane.

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.