United Kingdom: A recent study found that the intensity of hurricanes is increasing due to the climate crisis, to the extent that the standard 1 to 5 scale should be extended to include a “category 6” storm.
According to researchers, five storms over the last ten years would have qualified for this new category 6 strength, which would include all hurricanes with sustained winds of 192 mph or more. Such mega-hurricanes are becoming more likely due to global warming, studies have found, due to the warming of the oceans and atmosphere.
Scientist Michael Wehner of the US’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory stated, “It’s hard to even imagine that 192 mph is faster than most Ferraris. In collaboration with James Kossin, a researcher from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he has proposed the new category 6.
Proposing an expansion to the widely used Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, which was created in the early 1970s by civil engineer Herbert Saffir and meteorologist Robert Simpson, the director of the US National Hurricane Centre, the new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A hurricane is classified as a category 1 event on this scale if its sustained maximum wind speed is 74 mph or higher; the higher the winds, the higher the scale. The strongest hurricane, category 5, is thought to include all storms with a speed of 157 mph or more. Category 3 and above are major hurricanes that pose a serious risk of serious property and human damage.
Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans in 2005 and Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic effects on Puerto Rico in 2017 are just two examples of the spectacular damage that Category 5 storms have caused recently. However, a new study contends that a class of even more extreme storms now exists that warrants its own category.
Researchers have discovered that during the four-decade satellite record of hurricanes, the intensity of major storms has significantly increased, even though the overall number of hurricanes is not rising as a result of the climate crisis. Together with a warmer, more humid atmosphere, an extremely hot ocean is supplying additional energy to quickly intensify hurricanes.
However, there’s no sign that hurricanes officially classified as category 6 will occur anytime soon.
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