\nUpdated on September 10 at 9:32 a.m.<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/lead_960.jpg\")
<\/a>An empty highway is seen in downtown Miami before the arrival of Hurricane Irma to south Florida, on Saturday, September 9, 2017.<\/p><\/div>\n
Take it from the hurricane historian: There has never been a tropical cyclone quite like Irma.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve had storms this strong,\u201d said Phil Klotzbach, a meteorologist at Colorado State University who specializes in the history of Atlantic tropical cyclones. \u201cBut the thing that sets [Irma] apart is she stayed strong for a really long time\u2014and she\u2019s still incredibly strong.\u201d<\/p>\n
Klotzbach said two things stood out to him about Irma as historically notable: its longevity and its point of origin.<\/p>\n
As of Saturday evening, Irma has been a hurricane for 10 days, becoming the longest-lived Atlantic hurricane since Ike in 2008. It has stayed remarkably powerful over that time: When it makes landfall on Sunday, it will likely rank\u00a0among the 10 lowest-pressure cyclones<\/a>\u00a0ever to encounter the continental United States.<\/p>\n But Irma had a strange origin: It became a category-five storm in a part of the world that usually does not produce huge hurricanes. When major hurricanes have struck the continental United States in the past, they have always incubated in the much warmer waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean. That\u2019s where Katrina grew in 2005, for instance.<\/p>\n Irma, on the other hand, expanded to its massive size in the tropical Atlantic, east of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. \u201cTo get something east of the islands\u2014at least from the historical record, it hasn\u2019t happened before,\u201d said Klotzbach. \u201cWhen people in the [Leeward] Islands were saying, \u2018We\u2019ve never seen a storm this strong,\u2019 that\u2019s true. They haven\u2019t.\u201dNow that record-breaking cyclone comes in for its horrific finale. On Sunday morning, Irma made landfall in Florida as a category-four hurricane. It is the most ferocious storm seen in the Sunshine State since Hurricane Andrew cut east-to-west across the peninsula a quarter-century ago.The storm\u2019s strength has fluctuated over the past 24 hours, but officials warned that it remains extremely dangerous. On Sunday, it weakened to a category-three storm before intensifying again as it approached the Florida Keys. Forecasters expect the storm to \u201crestrengthen a little more<\/a>\u201d over the coming hours.<\/p>\n