Hurricanes are a part of life for coastal communities, but what happens when the storms we thought we understood get a whole lot worse?. Recently, a 2024 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposed something that might seem shocking: a new Category 6 for the most intense tropical cyclones, with wind speeds starting at 193 mph.
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Probably good to leave it as is. Hurricane Andrew was a tropical storm 3 days before hitting Florida. No one took it seriously. Two day before landfall it was a Cat. 4 which didn’t worry many people in the area with CBS homes. Then it blew up to a Cat. 5 and it was too late to evacuate. Having another category would just delay evacuations because they tend to delay moving unless a worst case scenario is presented. People do not understand the exponential force of wind and subsequent floods.
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The most destructive hurricanes in history where I live barely broke 65 knots.
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That would argue for making an exponential CAT- scale.
Nah, currently most don’t know what an exponent is much less what exponential means.
Define “ most “ Mr. “know it all” .
Most on this forum or most in USA .?
May be we shall watch some old Jay walking episodes to find out?
What about this system?
Do we need a better way to rate hurricanes, one that emphasizes the combination of wind speed, storm surge and rainfall, rather than wind alone?
We seem to think so, and so do many other meteorologists, including Jennifer Collins, a professor and hurricane researcher at USF.
“We know that wind only accounts for less than 10% of fatalities in general, but yet our current category system is based on wind alone,” Collins told weather.com. “Storm surge accounts for closer to 50% and rainfall accounts for closer to 30% so why not have a hurricane scale which takes into account all these hazards?”
De Moel wants to differentiate this possibility from the decades-old chat about adding a Category 6 to the SSHWS. “In the TCSS, a Category 6 signifies that there are more than one catastrophic hazard coming your way (i.e. both high winds and a storm surge together), making the storm more dangerous than if it was ‘just’ one catastrophic hazard.”
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The next step for susceptible areas/populations would be to actually know what ones elevation is above sea level.
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