As ocean temperatures skyrocket to new records, hurricanes are getting stronger and more destructive. According to new research, the five-category Saffir-Simpson Windscale may need to add a Category 6 with a minimum wind threshold of 192 miles per hour and, potentially, even a Category 7.
[Related: What hurricane categories mean, and why we use them.]
According to a peer-reviewed research article published February 5 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), five storms within the past decade have had wind speeds so strong that they could be classified as a hypothetical Category 6 tropical storm. The Saffir-Simpson Windscale currently lists Category 1 storms as those with wind speeds between 74 and 95 mph. Category 5 storms as those with wind speeds 158 mph. Some of the five storms in recent years that could fit a hypothetical Category 6 had winds over 200 mph.
“Our motivation is to reconsider how the open-endedness of the Saffir-Simpson Scale can lead to underestimation of risk, and, in particular, how this underestimation becomes increasingly problematic in a warming world,” study co-author and climate scientist Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said in a statement.
Human-caused global warming has significantly increased both surface ocean and tropospheric air temperatures in the regions where tropical cyclones, typhoons, and hurricanes form. The warm temperatures provide extra energy for the storms with which to intensify. In August 2023, Hurricane Idhalia rapidly intensified from a Category 2 storm to a Category 4 storm, but eventually hit the Big Bend region of Florida as a Category 3 with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. Tropical storms typically lose some steam as they hit land and are no longer over the warm water that they use for fuel. However, some storms like 2017’s Hurricane Harvey can produce so much rain that they stall and generate their own mini-oceans…
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