List of Category 5 South Pacific severe tropical cyclones

[1] The basin is officially monitored by the Fiji Meteorological Service (FMS) and the New Zealand MetService who are the primary warning centres for the region.

[1][4] Within the basin this scale is only officially used in American Samoa, however, systems are commonly compared to the SSHWS using 1-minute sustained windspeeds from the United States Joint Typhoon Warning Center.

[1][5][6] On both scales, a Category 5 tropical cyclone is expected to cause widespread devastation, if it significantly impacts land at or near its peak intensity.

[3][4] Before the formal start of the satellite era during the 1969-70 season, there was no way of determining how intense a tropical cyclone was unless it impacted land or either a ship or a plane happened to observe it.

[52] During 2014, Meteo France's French Polynesian Meteorological Centre and RSMC La Reunion published the results of a reanalysis, they had undertaken into Severe Tropical Cyclone's Nisha-Orama and Veena of the 1982-83 season.

[2] Within the reanalysis, they found that Nisha-Orama was the strongest tropical cyclone to impact French Polynesia on record and had peaked with 10-minute sustained wind speeds of 228 km/h (142 mph) and a minimum pressure of 898 hPa (26.52 inHg).

[2] During 2017, a study into extreme tropical cyclone activity in the southern Pacific Ocean was published in the Royal Meteorological Society's International Journal of Climatology.

Severe Tropical Cyclone's Pam, Winston, Harold and Yasa are the only systems to have made landfall while at Category 5 intensity and were considered to have caused widespread devastation to Fiji and Vanuatu.