Is category 5 the strongest a hurricane can be? A category 6 hurricane is possible, but not with the current method of measuring hurricanes.
The hurricane category system is called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. As the name suggests, it was invented by two people called Saffir and Simpson. Herbert Saffir was a civil engineer and Robert Simpson was a meteorologist. They came up with their scale in the 1970s for the National Hurricane Center. Herbert Saffir based the scale on the amount of damage the hurricane could do, using his background in structural engineering and Robert Simpson applied the meteorological part, describing the strength of the hurricane at each level. They came up with 5 levels. Each level of the scale lists the windspeed and then goes into considerable detail about what kind of damage to buildings and infrastructure that hurricane will cause. The damage each category of hurricane causes might be difficult to quantify, but Saffir does a great job. For example, in a category two hurricane: Well-constructed frame homes could sustain major roof and siding damage. Many shallowly rooted trees will be snapped or uprooted and block numerous roads. Near-total power loss is expected with outages that could last from several days to weeks.
The wind speeds are easier to quantify and this is why a category six hurricane would be possible if we chose to make one. Category one has wind speeds of 119 to 153 km/h. Category two is 154 to 177 km/h. Category three is 178 km/h to 208 km/h. Category four is 209 to 251 km/h. Category five is 252 km/h or higher. The only way to make a category six hurricane would be to put an upper limit on the wind speed of a category five and then make the category six over that. But, are there ever any hurricanes that are that strong and is there any need for a category six?
Because a category 5 has a wind strength of 252 km/h and above, it would be simple to cap that and then have a category 6. Hurricanes are getting more frequent and stronger year by year because of climate change, but are they getting so strong that they need a new category? There have been 42 category 5 hurricanes recorded since 1924. The quantity and intensity of the hurricanes is gradually increasing because climate change is heating the seas and the hot wet air is super heating the storms, making them more powerful.
If we were going to make a category 6 hurricane, what would be the upper limit of category 5? Each category has a band of roughly 30 km/h, give or take a few. That means the upper limit of category 5 would be 282 km/h. The highest recorded wind speed in a hurricane was 345 km/h. That was with hurricane Patricia in 2015. However, that was a 1 min wind and the measure of a hurricane’s strength is a ten-minute sustained wind. If we look at those, there are 9 hurricanes that go over 282 km/h. So, if there was a category 6, 9 hurricanes would be in it. The problem is that wind speed alone is not a measure of the strength of a hurricane. We have to look at damage as well and the qualification for a category five hurricane is “catastrophic damage will occur”. There doesn’t seem a way to go higher than catastrophic damage. What could a category 6 hurricane have? Total damage? Catastrophic seems to have everything covered. The only way to make a category 6 would be to reclassify all of the other categories, and is there really a point in doing that?
Another problem is that the strength of a hurricane is not a very accurate way of predicting how much damage it will do because a lot of the damage and deaths come from water. When we talk about a category 5 hurricane, people focus on the windspeed, but it is the rainfall, the floods, and the surges that are the real danger. The flooding can occur thousands of kilometers away from the windiest part of the hurricane, where it is nowhere near a category 5. As climate change heats up the seas, the hurricanes can carry more water than they used to, which is making them even more deadly, whether they are category 5 or not. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Pixabay: https://www.pexels.com/photo/earth-planet-76969/
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_scale
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/10/07/category-6-hurricane-milton-gulf/75562829007
https://www.weather.gov/mfl/saffirsimpson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_intense_tropical_cyclones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes
https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2024-02-08-category-six-hurricanes-saffir-simpson-scale
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