Category 6

The fifth category of hurricanes applies to the largest and most terrible storms. However, some American scientists claim that this no longer corresponds to the intensity of recent hurricanes. A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out the basis for expanding the current hurricane rating system with a new category. It is recommended to be assigned to storms with wind speeds over 192 miles per hour (309 kilometers per hour). According to the research, the world has already seen storms that could be classified as Category 6.

We expected that climate change would lead to stronger winds during the strongest storms. We showed that this was already happening and tried to calculate how much worse the situation could get.
– says Michael Wehner, co-author of the paper and extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Some experts don’t believe it would be helpful to add a new category to our hurricane dictionaries.

What storms can be attributed to Category 6?

The idea of ​​adding a Category 6 has been floated several times over the past few decades, as storms like 2019’s Hurricane Dorian reached some of the highest wind speeds on record (298 kilometers per hour) and leveled entire towns in the Bahamas. . The current Category 5 refers to any tropical cyclone with winds greater than 157 miles per hour (253 kilometers per hour).

The new threshold for Category 6 would mean some of the strongest storms ever recorded. Wehner and his co-author James Kossen, a climate scientist at the nonprofit First Street Foundation, found: At least five storms have reached this level in the last decadeIt signals that a warming world will produce more and more terrible storms.

• The strongest of these, Hurricane Patricia, hit the Pacific coast of Mexico in 2015 with winds reaching incredible speeds. 346 kilometers per hour. Fortunately, the storm passed through a relatively sparsely populated area, causing minimal destruction and death.
• Another powerful storm, Haiyan, hit the Philippines in 2013. 314 kilometers per hour. It killed more than 6,000 people, making it one of the deadliest disasters in modern history.

The United States, where hurricanes are a seasonal occurrence, has not experienced a storm with such strong winds in the modern era, but the authors found that conditions in the region were already ripe for a Category 6 storm. This is because climate change is making the oceans and atmosphere warmer, providing “food” for more intense hurricanes. Analyzing atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic, Vener and Cossen found several cases where the air was hot enough to initiate storms with winds over 306 km per hour. The country is lucky that this hasn’t happened yet, but as the planet warms, our chances of seeing such a storm increase. The authors believe that 2 degrees Celsius of warming triples the risk of a Category 6 storm in the Atlantic Ocean.