Stronger storms mean new 'category six' scale may be needed

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/22/category-six-storms-cyclones

Eleanor Ainge Roy
Wed 21 Feb 2018 23.13 EST
Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 17.00 EST

The increasing strength, intensity and duration of tropical cyclones has climate scientists asking whether a new classification needs to be created: a category-six storm.

The Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale currently runs in severity from one to five, with five describing near-total destruction.

But climate scientists meeting at a conference in the New Zealand city of Wellington have floated the idea of creating a category six to reflect the increasing severity of tropical cyclones in the wake of warming sea temperatures and climate change.
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Climatologist Michael Mann, the director of the Earth system science center at Penn State University said the current scale could be viewed as increasingly outdated.

“Scientifically, [six] would be a better description of the strength of 200mph (320km/h) storms, and it would also better communicate the well-established finding now that climate change is making the strongest storms even stronger,” he said.

He pointed out that category five was previously considered the highest category necessary because it led to essentially total destruction of human infrastructure. But that was no longer true owing to sturdier construction

“Since the scale is now used as much in a scientific context as it is a damage assessment context, it makes sense to introduce a category six to describe the unprecedented strength 200mph storms we’ve seen over the past few years both globally [Patricia] and here in the southern hemisphere [Winston].”

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