The 10 strongest hurricanes ever to hit the Atlantic Ocean

Hurricane Irma is slamming the Caribbean as a category 5 storm.

Irma's recorded maximum wind speed hit 185 mph on Wednesday, with some gusts of wind moving as fast as 215 mph.

That makes the storm one of the most powerful ever to hit the Atlantic basin.

The categories on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale are determined based on wind speed, but that's not the only element of a hurricane that causes damage. Flooding, a metric that the categories don't take into account, can often become a costly problem, as was recently seen when Hurricane Harvey flooded parts of Texas and Louisiana.

To put this year's storms into perspective, here are 10 hurricanes that topped the charts as the strongest in the history of the Atlantic Ocean, based on wind speed and pressure.