9 ms·

We've already seen category 6 hurricanes – scientists want to make it official

260 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

swagmoose 3y ago
"multiple storms have already spilled over into the hypothetical category 6" If they do go this route, I'd like it if they future-proofed it and include categories 6-10. Seems inevitable we're gonna see the first category 7 in the next 5-10 years.
- anatnom 3y ago
  Confusingly, the paper[0] cited by this article seems undecided on this front. Figure 1A of the paper puts Hurricane Patricia (2015) into hypothetical category 7, but the "current and proposed categories" in Table 1 stops at declaring category 6 wind speed > 86 m/s (or 192mph, 167 knots, 309 km/h), and category 7 doesn't make an appearance elsewhere in the paper. I was really hoping to find an authoritative listing of the strongest storms, but it is missing in both the linked article and the underlying paper. The paper itself uses data from International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, which has a confusing website. As a non-expert, the website's top windspeed[1] category lists the following storms with maximum wind speeds of >167 knots (category 6 in the proposed scheme): 213kt - 1958 IDA 194kt - 1958 GRACE, 1959 JOAN, 1959 DINAH, 1961 NANCY, 1964 SALLY 185kt - 2015 PATRICIA 184kt - 1961 VIOLET 180kt - 1955 RUTH 178kt - 1955 JANET, 174kt - 1951 MARGE, 1953 NINA, 1956 WANDA, 1957 VIRGINIA, 1957 HESTER, 1957 KIT, 1957 LOLA, 1959 VERA, 1959 CHARLOTTE, 1966 KIT 170kt - 1964 OPAL, 2013 HAIYAN, 2016 MERANTI, 2020 GONI, 2021 SURIGAE I don't see any explanation for why there were so many fantastically powerful storms in the 1950s-60s. Perhaps the older data is of dubious quality? [0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121#t01 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121#t01 [1] https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=browse-wind#210 https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=browse-wind#210
  - scythe 3y ago
    Wikipedia gives Typhoon Ida (not to be confused with various hurricanes named Ida) a wind speed of "only" 175 knots (325 kph; 202 mph) which accounts for the largest outlier in the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Ida_(1958) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Ida_(1958)
    - anatnom 3y ago
      Confusingly, that wikipedia page cites the same IBTrACS system that I referred to, and in that page[0] the max intensity is listed at 213 knots. The data shows that the 213 knot speed was seen for measurements across twelve hours on 1958-09-24. [0] https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N13148 https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N1314...
      - sudenmorsian 3y ago
        You are looking at the data for the CMA (China Meteorological Agency). The official data center for the Western Pacific according to the World Meteorological Agency is the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA/Tokyo), but the IBTrACS dataset does not have wind speeds from them for 1958. The Wikipedia article is sourcing data from the JTWC (Joint Typhoon Warning Center), the US wind column for 1-minute sustained wind speeds. In general, the Wikipedia convention is to include wind speed data from the JMA and JTWC when available.
  - dwd 3y ago
    There is some research regarding an increase in Saharan dust storms that retards hurricane development in the Eastern Atlantic. Apparently this is still trending upwards and has resulted in fewer hurricanes forming over the last few decades.
- Animats 3y ago
  The scale is somewhat arbitrary (plot the points) but category 7 would start somewhere around 225MPH. Highest ever recorded is 215MPH, so category 7 is worth having in reserve.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    Ida/Kanogawa was 245 mph/213 knot peak. https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N13148 https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N1314...
    - zamadatix 3y ago
      Saffir–Simpson is based on sustained, not peak.
- sdenton4 3y ago
  Set Category 10 at the speed of light, then work backwards...
  - thfuran 3y ago
    Well that's easy. The meteorologists can remember that category number = 10 v' / c, where v' is the maximum median windspeed over a one hundred acre convex region, and all anyone else needs to know is that every storm is cat 0.
- richardw 3y ago
  Agree, need to do this properly. What's a fair cap in our solar system? "Neptune’s winds are the fastest in the solar system, reaching 1,600 miles per hour!" What category is that? https://scijinks.gov/planetary-weather/#:~:text=Neptune%27s%20winds%20are%20the%20fastest,could%20swallow%20the%20whole%20Earth https://scijinks.gov/planetary-weather/#:~:text=Neptune%27s%....
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    I would guess that atmospheric pressure is going to matter a lot for the expected "damage", so it would not make sense in places where it's wildly different ?
- _tom_ 3y ago
  Why should we "create" categories. There should be an algorithm for determining level. Input 1000 miles an hour, you get a category. Earthquakes don't have an upper limit. It's just a function of energy.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Earthquakes are sort of naturally limited though. A 9.0 is going to be catastrophic no matter what, and while I’m not saying a 10 couldn’t happen it would probably be something like once in a billion year event.
    - BeefWellington 3y ago
      10.0 is firmly in "if it happens nobody's gonna be around to care what it's designated" territory I think. There's a practical point at which the death tolls are going to be sufficiently high that the number probably shouldn't matter. Though in tornadoes there definitely are EF-4 designated twisters that are hotly contested online as being truly EF-5; often that's down to where damage occurs in the lifetime of a tornado though and it being difficult to prove windspeeds when a system is moving through, e.g.: trailer park vs an industrial park.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        I don't think it's quite as cut and dried as that. A 9.5 hit Chile about 60 years ago, and about 95% of the most directly hit town survived. Which is not to minimize it - there were thousands of fatalities - but it was human scale tragedy, not apocalypse.
  - ewhanley 3y ago
    An estimate of the upper limit of an earthquake is approximately 10. It's a function of max rock strength.
    - selectodude 3y ago
      It’s actually a function of energy released. The earthquake can get bigger if the fault slip is larger. A magnitude 12 quake is technically possible but requires an entire hemisphere to slip 500 meters. There’s a really interesting paper that takes the moment magnitude scale to its logical extremes. PDF warning: https://www.fujipress.jp/main/wp-content/themes/Fujipress/pdf_subscribed.php https://www.fujipress.jp/main/wp-content/themes/Fujipress/pd...
- bugbuddy 3y ago
  Not necessarily because there may not be any difference between a wind speed of 350mph and 400mph wind in term of destructive power. Both may simply be able to strip the land bare and deliver the everything above it many miles away as well as temporarily moving parts of the sea miles inland.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  By the time storms of 7+ come that level become commonplace, I doubt there will be people track and name them.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ComplexSystems 3y ago
  While that is probably most sensible, it doesn't seem like a lot of fun. Instead, I recommend we call a new global conference, every few years, to discuss the addition of each individual natural number to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    That does sound fun! Is the idea to progress sequentially? or do we consider the proposal of 13 before 7 if there is enough support to do so?
rblatz 3y ago
Category 1 - 74-95 mph Category 2 - 96-110 mph Category 3 - 111-129 mph Category 4 - 130-156 mph Category 5 - 157 mph or higher I’m not sure why these divisions were made. The jumps between are seemingly arbitrary, from 27 mph to 15 mph and no pattern I can discern. What makes the next jump to 192 which is the largest jump yet?
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  I think its the damage that benign debris can do to a person at certain speed thresholds but I could be wrong
  - senectus1 3y ago
    which seems weird when you consider the building materials and styles that different regions use.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  Like Fujita scale for Tornados, it's about potential for potential damage it can cause which is here dependent somehow on the wind speed variable. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable about it can explain how it's correlated, but it's not about wind speeds (alone).
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    Reminded of a joke by Ron White in the context of a person choosing to remain behind in a hurricane because they believe they can withstand the wind and rain: “It’s not that the wind is blowin’, it’s what the wind is blowin’.” On topic, it makes me wonder if the wind cutoffs have to do with what can be additionally picked up by the increase in energy. I’d honestly assume not but I would still hesitate to assume that it’s arbitrary. Not really sure but the phrasing of the joke made me wonder.
    - Keyframe 3y ago
      This made me interested as well. Why the exact cut-offs, right? I found few resources like NOAA https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/sshws.pdf https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/sshws.pdf and wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_scale saying basically about the wind speed that the actual wind speed is "sustained winds as average winds over a period of one minute, measured at the same 33 ft (10.1 m) height" and then I thought ok if this scalar we're using is correlated to potential damage, that would mean force, right? They did remove air pressure and storm surges as components later on. I didn't bother with air pressure outside of standard since it would deviate a lot into researching exactly that. Since it's not really my domain, I decided to wing it by googling around and looked for wind force formulas. One that I found out ( https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2017/09/07/hurricane-wind-force-increases-as-the-square-of-the-velocity/#:~:text=The%20Force%20on%20a%20unit,F%20%3D%20r%20V%5E2 https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2017/09/07/hurricane-wi.... ) can roughly be translated as F = v^2 but then when I charted it out with x being wind speed and y proportional force, only thing I found out was that it looked logarithmic (which I didn't need a chart for lol ). The other I found was saying for wind load formula "The generic formula for wind load is F = A x P x Cd where F is the force or wind load, A is the projected area of the object, P is the wind pressure, and Cd is the drag coefficient." I had to hunt for variables here, but gist of it is that since scale is in mph I went USA with 1 square foot for A - area (and then to square meters from that, 0,093 m^2), wind speed to m/s, and went with these (more googling): Wind Pressure (P) is P = 0.5 x p x V^2 where p (rho actually) is air density (google: 1.225 kg/m^3 at sea level and 15C, I couldn't find one at 10m height), V is our wind speed, and Cd (drag coefficient) for a flat plate which is 1.28 according to https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/airplane/shaped.html#:~:text=A%20flat%20plate%20has%20Cd,07%20to%20 https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/a.... tl;dr; I couldn't find clear cuts in Newtons. I tried minimum, maximum and average wind speeds for each categories, and then I kind of lost interest there. More googling says that it was based on established observations what wind force can do to structures, but no more than that and I couldn't source original work to see more details. Outside of optics, this is as far as my physics will lead me tonight. I'd be highly interested to see if anyone more in the know can provide methodology behind it, be it from meteorology, construction, or fluid dynamics.
unethical_ban 3y ago
It's nothing new to talk about, but rating a hurricane's destructive force on windspeed alone is sub-optimal. On the other side, one-dimensional labels for a storm help convey the severity of it quickly and unambiguously. Hurricanes have three components IIRC (as someone who lived on the coast a long time): Storm surge flooding, rain flooding, and wind. Hurricane Ike was a cat2 in 2008, which did significant damage to the Houston coast because of its large storm surge. Harvey in 2017 was damaging due to its consistent rain over the area as it stalled. Tropical storm Allison in 2001 was similar. One may argue that wind causes the most acute damage as well as the fastest "change in status" of the three: High winds can topple a tree to block a road instantly, or rip the roof from a house in a flash, or knock down powerlines taking out a neighborhood. While I'm not against a cat 6 or higher rating existing, for the sake of human communication "cat 5" means "get the hell out of there" already.
- pjot 3y ago
  > Storm surge flooding, rain flooding, and wind I use wind and the speed of the storm directionally as my mental model when thinking about hurricanes. Rain/surge flooding are results of how long the system is over an area. That said if a storm is a 3+ I’ll leave - driving 3-4 hours is way more enjoyable than trying to sleep with no AC
- metaphor 3y ago
  > Hurricane Ike was a cat2 in 2008, which did significant damage to the Houston coast because of its large storm surge. > Harvey in 2017 was damaging due to its consistent rain over the area as it stalled. The outsider impression that I took away was that a major reason why Houston got so rekt by a mere Cat 2 hurricane was in large part driven by property developers building communities in low lying areas that the Army Corp of Engineers had designated as "emergency spillways"[1][2]...the Army knew about the risk, the city turned a blind eye, and the devil in the details weren't disclosed to homebuyers. Perhaps there's more to the story? > While I'm not against a cat 6 or higher rating existing, for the sake of human communication "cat 5" means "get the hell out of there" already. I agree, but skipping town isn't always an option even if you wanted to; experienced two such events[3][4] on Guam as a kid. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/us/houston-harvey-flooding-reservoir.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/us/houston-ha... [2] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2021/how-houston-floods/ https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2021/how-houston-f... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Omar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Omar [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Paka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Paka
wpollock 3y ago
The problem with this is that wind speed alone is not a good indicator of how destructive a storm can be. Storm surge, mud slides, etc., contribute and can be deadly even in a category 1 or 2 storm. If the scale is to be updated, it would be beneficial to include other factors in addition to wind speed.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Wind speed is measurable before landfall, many other destructive indicators are only so after the destruction is done.
  - interestica 3y ago
    The enhanced fujita scale for tornadoes takes into account an assessment of damage after the fact to make a guess of the wind speeds that were produced. An after-the-fact assessment of hurricanes could be useful in creating a categorization that better communicates risk to persons than just windspeed.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Maybe, but the Fujita scale can greatly under report strength, because the higher grades need to be justified by damage to modern, well built structures. There are tons of tornadoes that meteorologists are sure are at least EF-4 based on Doppler and video, but are rated at EF-1 or EF-2 because they didn’t hit anything but cornfields and sheds.
      - basil-rash 3y ago
        Isn’t that the system working as-designed? We don’t really need to blast the alarm for a few stalks getting bent out of shape.
        TylerE 3y ago
        It can lead to a false sense of security... maybe if it turns east instead of north east it barrels into downtown Omaha. In the most extreme case a small tornado in a larger storm that hits no man-built structures may go totally unrecorded. Essentially if you assess tornado risk as something like (frequency * severity) / area, this will under assess risk to a previously developed area that is now being developed. Before there was nothing to hit. Now there is.
stubish 3y ago
I had previously heard that category 5 storms were originally thought to be impossible, and only became possible due to global warming adding more energy into the atmosphere. The article however states that category 6 was technically possible as far back as 1979. Have these category 5, 6 and maybe higher always been possible, but just more improbable?
- TylerE 3y ago
  There were 19th century storms that were clearly 5s, at least. Whoever told you that didn’t know that the hell they were talking about, to put it mildly.
interestica 3y ago
> The question of whether a category 6 would be an effective communication tool requires a larger discussion, with input from social scientists, psychologists, emergency managers, and city planners, Kossin said. Or, communications professionals! I would love to see more emphasis on science communications. The article touches on the fact that the Saffir-Simpson scale kinda over-relies on arbitrary windspeeds as its categorization factor. It doesn't take into account the potential damage from storm surges and flooding. (Also, as the comedian Ron White has remarked, it's not that the wind blows, but what the wind blows.[1]) Does a human have any way of conceptualizing the difference of 178-208 km/h (cat4) versus 252+ km/h (cat5) hurricane? Instead, there's an over reliance on the number -- perpetuated by how news media portray the storms. In October 2023 residents of Acapulco, Mexico were told that a Category 1 hurricane was approaching. It rapidly intensified to a cat 5 within a day and residents were totally unprepared.[2] Did residents even know "rapid intensification" was even possible? Is the potential for rapid intensification due to warming waters the thing we should be communicating rather than "category numbers"? In 2007 they updated the 'Fujita Scale' for Tornadoes (Now the 'Enhanced Fujita Scale') to better incorporate assessed damage.[3] Do we need some sort of update to the Saffir-Simpson scale that better takes into account potential/assessed damage? (Especially as it relates to the flooding/storm surge aspects). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQD7Fzid1xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQD7Fzid1xI [2] https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/information/data-in-action?title=What%20caused%20Hurricane%20Otis%20to%20intensify%20so%20rapidly%3F https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/information/data-in-action?title=... [3] https://www.weather.gov/oun/efscale https://www.weather.gov/oun/efscale edit: In terms of what the wind blows: an equivalent category storm that hits Jamaica versus one that hits Houston will likely produce very different levels of damage purely due to the difference in infrastructure types. Yet, both regions are warned with the same "category number."
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  This is also similar to the difference between Moment Magnitude vs Modified Mercalli or Shindo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_seismic_intensity_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_se...
ggreer 3y ago
I am skeptical of this paper. If you go to Wikipedia's list of most intense tropical cyclones[1] and sort by barometric pressure, there doesn't seem to be much correlation with time. The biggest and most intense tropical cyclone is still Typhoon Tip in 1979.[2] If you read the actual study[3], it looks like they do a lot of data manipulation and simulation to come to their conclusion. They subtract 15 meters/sec from wind speeds measured before 1973, claiming a bias in measurements from that time. This causes a huge step up in lifetime maximum intensity in the 1970s. Their estimates of future category 6 probabilities are from simulations that they admit don't simulate current conditions correctly. I think it's more likely than not that tropical cyclones are getting more intense, and that they're hitting places that didn't typically get hit in the past, but I don't find this paper convincing. It really feels like they cajoled the data to fit their conclusion. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_intense_tropical_cyclones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_intense_tropi... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Tip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Tip 3. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121
- PM_me_your_math 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Grokker 3y ago
    [flagged]
- BeefWellington 3y ago
  In fairness though, they didn't just make up their bias assertion; it's in other published works[1] and there is real evidence that old measurements were incorrect (biased towards the high side) when compared to other available contemporary measurements. [1]: Landsea, C. W. Mon. Weath. Rev. 121, 1703–1714 (1993) - https://journals.ametsoc.org/configurable/content/journals$002fmwre$002f121$002f6$002f1520-0493_1993_121_1703_acoima_2_0_co_2.xml?t%3Aac=journals%24002fmwre%24002f121%24002f6%24002f1520-0493_1993_121_1703_acoima_2_0_co_2.xml&tab_body=pdf https://journals.ametsoc.org/configurable/content/journals$0...
dskrvk 3y ago
This is exactly the premise of Bruce Sterling’s novel “Heavy Weather”.
irrelative 3y ago
Classic spinal tap. “These go to eleven.”
jcalx 3y ago
For futureproofing, we should extend the scale to cover hypercanes [1], which (according to Wikipedia): - require ocean temperatures of 120 °F (50 °C) - have sustained winds of 500 mph (800 km/h) - have barometric pressures in their centers sufficiently low enough to cause altitude sickness - may persist for several weeks due to above low pressure - may be as large as North America or as small as 15 mi (25 km) — Wikipedia has an unhelpful caption about the size of the "average hypercane" (!) - extend into the upper stratosphere, unlike today's hurricanes (lower stratosphere) - due to above height, may sufficiently degrade the ozone layer with water vapor to the point of causing (an additional) hazard to planetary life As of today, both a hypercane and a regular, run-of-the-mill catastrophic hurricane would be rated a Category 5. But I suppose hurricane categorization and nomenclature would be the least of NOAA's problems in such an event. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane
- Nevermark 3y ago
  > But I suppose hurricane categorization and nomenclature would be the least of NOAA's problems in such an event. This is implausible to me. Just to be safe, we should get the naming done up front.
zgs 3y ago
I'm skeptical about one of the opening sentences in the article: "category 5 underestimates actual risk". Category 5 cyclones/hurricanes are already assumed to essentially destroy everything in their path. This will still be true regardless of how strong the winds get. Having experienced several lower category cyclones, there really isn't a lot to do except 1/ evacuate if you've got time and a place to go or 2/ bunker down and pray. It's just luck that I've not experienced a direct hit from a higher category storm.
sidlls 3y ago
I’ve been in cat 1 and cat 2 storms. They’re awesome in their power for destruction. I’ve evacuated from a category 4 storm, which did a huge amount of damage in the city when it hit. A category 5 storm is essentially going to destroy everything in its path already. What good would adding a 6th category do?
- nscalf 3y ago
  I lived in Florida for a long time, I can tell you that people don’t evacuate when it’s a cat 4 threatening to maybe become a cat 5. Having a category meaning “this is much worse than a 4” would be meaningful here. I see no reason to have an upper limit, it just artificially makes everything at and above the cat 5 threshold mean the same thing. Also, Florida homes are built from cement, meant to survive storms like that. The building codes come from hurricane andrew, a particularly damaging cat 5.
  - Beldin 3y ago
    > Having a category meaning “this is much worse than a 4” would be meaningful here. But don't you think that cat 5 would become the new 4? That is: why do you think extending the scale will expand the range of warnings communicated, instead of smearing the existing range out over more values?
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      > don't you think that cat 5 would become the new 4? The few who might be saved are worth it. We can’t keep optimising for saving idiots.
  - matwood 3y ago
    Florida gonna Florida. I grew up and still live in a hurricane area. Went through a cat 5 as a kid - not going to do that again. But, cat 2/3 or less I'm not going anywhere. Last time we took a direct cat 2, we didn't even lose power. Like you said, FL and really most of the southeast coast learned from Andrew. Simple changes like roof ties and more expensive ones like cement plank siding make a pretty significant difference [1]. TBH, my main concern in a storm is water. My house is ~12' off the ground and given its location, if there's water in the house we're basically in an end of days, biblical level storm. [1] https://www.usglassmag.com/30-years-later-hurricane-andrew-redesigned-modern-building-codes/ https://www.usglassmag.com/30-years-later-hurricane-andrew-r...
anArbitraryOne 3y ago
Next thing you know they'll be trying to make category 7 hurricanes official
okokwhatever 3y ago
Another Emergency to take care of. This is the reason why TV/movies lost mojo since a decade ago, its a better entertainment to wait for the next emergency (and read about it in the media) than waiting for the next blockbuster.
obblekk 3y ago
This might be true but paradoxically, there hasn’t been an observed frequency or intensity of Florida hurricanes in last 100 years [1]. Florida is worth looking at because they were industrialized and have had relatively robust meteorological record for the entire period. I do wonder why as it seems like common sense that heating air and water temps (which have happened) would cause more evaporation and potential for water and wind storms. [1] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/ https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
nraynaud 3y ago
As a wertern European, the first time I converted wind speeds from a US hurricane, I thought I fumbled the maths, it was like 100kph/60mph higher than our winter storms. I since learned that the storm scale and the hurricane scale are different, and we simply don't have hurricanes here, we never see real crazy wind speeds and we don't use the hurricane scale at all.
- albrewer 3y ago
  The aftermath of a hurricane is like nothing you've ever experienced - there's something deeply unsettling about all the trees in a forest being bent uniformly in one direction, or entire neighborhoods completely erased. 285 km/h sustained winds comes out to roughly 3.8 kpa pressure on all surfaces. So for every 1m^2 of surface area perpendicular to the wind direction, you're getting ~350kgf applied.
- djmips 3y ago
  In the Pacific Northwest, we get extra bad wind storms around every 30 years. The storm in 1993 was 60-75 mph and going back to 1921 a storm was 115 mph with gusts to 150 mph. What's it like in Western Europe?
  - nraynaud 3y ago
    I'd say Lothar was a very big recent one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Lothar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Lothar (albeit the name, cyclones don't develop if the ocean water is less than 26°C, and let me tell you that there was a solid 15-20°C margin in the zone). Germany had some solid gust speeds, but when you look at France, it's not biting that much in the 100mph.
- LorenPechtel 3y ago
  Hurricanes require big patches of warm ocean to feed on--they can leave such areas but they will weaken with time if they don't have warm ocean to feed on. Furthermore, northern-hemisphere hurricanes will in general move northeast, your water is to the west.
- 3y ago
partitioned 3y ago
I like how this is basically scientists arguing about tier lists. The stats tell the story but people just love to rank things.
miller_joe 3y ago
I just happen to be reading Peter F. Hamilton's Confederation universe (1996–2000) trilogy and in it earth has been dealing with the "Armada storms" for a couple hundred years due to climate change. From the descriptions there are multiple of these storms occurring at any given time. Humans now live in "arcologies" which are giant multi-kilometer domes over population centers. There was no way to reverse the damage done. We can't fly anymore so everything is in a very fast underground train system called "vac-trains". I suppose this may be where we are headed (although I'd rather love to see the vac-train system)
- lawlessone 3y ago
  That one's the Edenist Universe or the MorningLightMountain universe?
  - miller_joe 3y ago
    Edenists. MLM is the Commonwealth Saga, if I recall. First book “Pandora’s Star”
xg15 3y ago
There is already lots of discussion about science communication in this thread, but I think what would also be extremely important is good communication after the scale has changed. Should there be a decision to extend the scale, the fact that there was a change should be communicated as widely as possible: Make it an item in the evening news, put a footnote in every article that uses the term "category 6 hurricane" for a few months, etc. Explain exactly when the scale was changed, who made the decision and on what grounds. Because if not, this will be an open flank for climate denialists: I think the "natural" tendency of most media outlets would be to just quote press releases or forecasts verbatim and use the new term as if it had always been there. To uninformed viewers, this would give the impression that either the scale always went to 6 and they just somehow never noticed or that the scale was open-ended and we're now getting the first cat6 hurricanes because of climate change. Both assumptions are obviously wrong, and so a climate denialist will gleefully pull out their "research" that the scale has been changed as evidence of manipulation and conspiracy. I think this is something that should strongly be avoided.
groovimus 3y ago
So my question would be, if the paper is logically sound then we are looking at a mechanism where the energy boost from increasing ocean temperatures is only applicable to the storms of cat 5. Why? Because we have data that show the yearly frequency of named tropical cyclones. The chart of these fequencies from 1980~2022 which I link below, indicates no discernable trend. This means that the postulated increase in storm intensity is somehow not promoting otherwise 'would-be' tropical storms into the cyclone categories. Consider the energy distribution over the 5 categories. So this leaves us with, if the logic of the paper is verified, a situation where only the kurtosis of that distribution is affected by ocean temperature -- and not any other statistial parameters. So this should be a future topic for study, why only the higher energy storms are enhanced and not the lower energy ones. In other words why is the kurtosis of this distribution enhanced by increasing ocean temperature? link: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269915/number-named-storms-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269915/number-named-sto...

260 points by sohkamyung 3y ago

"multiple storms have already spilled over into the hypothetical category 6" If they do go this route, I'd like it if they future-proofed it and include categories 6-10. Seems inevitable we're gonna see the first category 7 in the next 5-10 years.

anatnom 3y ago
Confusingly, the paper[0] cited by this article seems undecided on this front. Figure 1A of the paper puts Hurricane Patricia (2015) into hypothetical category 7, but the "current and proposed categories" in Table 1 stops at declaring category 6 wind speed > 86 m/s (or 192mph, 167 knots, 309 km/h), and category 7 doesn't make an appearance elsewhere in the paper. I was really hoping to find an authoritative listing of the strongest storms, but it is missing in both the linked article and the underlying paper. The paper itself uses data from International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship, which has a confusing website. As a non-expert, the website's top windspeed[1] category lists the following storms with maximum wind speeds of >167 knots (category 6 in the proposed scheme): 213kt - 1958 IDA 194kt - 1958 GRACE, 1959 JOAN, 1959 DINAH, 1961 NANCY, 1964 SALLY 185kt - 2015 PATRICIA 184kt - 1961 VIOLET 180kt - 1955 RUTH 178kt - 1955 JANET, 174kt - 1951 MARGE, 1953 NINA, 1956 WANDA, 1957 VIRGINIA, 1957 HESTER, 1957 KIT, 1957 LOLA, 1959 VERA, 1959 CHARLOTTE, 1966 KIT 170kt - 1964 OPAL, 2013 HAIYAN, 2016 MERANTI, 2020 GONI, 2021 SURIGAE I don't see any explanation for why there were so many fantastically powerful storms in the 1950s-60s. Perhaps the older data is of dubious quality? [0] https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121#t01 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121#t01 [1] https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=browse-wind#210 https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=browse-wind#210
- scythe 3y ago
  Wikipedia gives Typhoon Ida (not to be confused with various hurricanes named Ida) a wind speed of "only" 175 knots (325 kph; 202 mph) which accounts for the largest outlier in the list. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Ida_(1958) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Ida_(1958)
  - anatnom 3y ago
    Confusingly, that wikipedia page cites the same IBTrACS system that I referred to, and in that page[0] the max intensity is listed at 213 knots. The data shows that the 213 knot speed was seen for measurements across twelve hours on 1958-09-24. [0] https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N13148 https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N1314...
    - sudenmorsian 3y ago
      You are looking at the data for the CMA (China Meteorological Agency). The official data center for the Western Pacific according to the World Meteorological Agency is the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA/Tokyo), but the IBTrACS dataset does not have wind speeds from them for 1958. The Wikipedia article is sourcing data from the JTWC (Joint Typhoon Warning Center), the US wind column for 1-minute sustained wind speeds. In general, the Wikipedia convention is to include wind speed data from the JMA and JTWC when available.
- dwd 3y ago
  There is some research regarding an increase in Saharan dust storms that retards hurricane development in the Eastern Atlantic. Apparently this is still trending upwards and has resulted in fewer hurricanes forming over the last few decades.
Animats 3y ago
The scale is somewhat arbitrary (plot the points) but category 7 would start somewhere around 225MPH. Highest ever recorded is 215MPH, so category 7 is worth having in reserve.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Ida/Kanogawa was 245 mph/213 knot peak. https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N13148 https://ncics.org/ibtracs/index.php?name=v04r00-1958263N1314...
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    Saffir–Simpson is based on sustained, not peak.
sdenton4 3y ago
Set Category 10 at the speed of light, then work backwards...
- thfuran 3y ago
  Well that's easy. The meteorologists can remember that category number = 10 v' / c, where v' is the maximum median windspeed over a one hundred acre convex region, and all anyone else needs to know is that every storm is cat 0.
richardw 3y ago
Agree, need to do this properly. What's a fair cap in our solar system? "Neptune’s winds are the fastest in the solar system, reaching 1,600 miles per hour!" What category is that? https://scijinks.gov/planetary-weather/#:~:text=Neptune%27s%20winds%20are%20the%20fastest,could%20swallow%20the%20whole%20Earth https://scijinks.gov/planetary-weather/#:~:text=Neptune%27s%....
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  I would guess that atmospheric pressure is going to matter a lot for the expected "damage", so it would not make sense in places where it's wildly different ?
_tom_ 3y ago
Why should we "create" categories. There should be an algorithm for determining level. Input 1000 miles an hour, you get a category. Earthquakes don't have an upper limit. It's just a function of energy.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Earthquakes are sort of naturally limited though. A 9.0 is going to be catastrophic no matter what, and while I’m not saying a 10 couldn’t happen it would probably be something like once in a billion year event.
  - BeefWellington 3y ago
    10.0 is firmly in "if it happens nobody's gonna be around to care what it's designated" territory I think. There's a practical point at which the death tolls are going to be sufficiently high that the number probably shouldn't matter. Though in tornadoes there definitely are EF-4 designated twisters that are hotly contested online as being truly EF-5; often that's down to where damage occurs in the lifetime of a tornado though and it being difficult to prove windspeeds when a system is moving through, e.g.: trailer park vs an industrial park.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      I don't think it's quite as cut and dried as that. A 9.5 hit Chile about 60 years ago, and about 95% of the most directly hit town survived. Which is not to minimize it - there were thousands of fatalities - but it was human scale tragedy, not apocalypse.
- ewhanley 3y ago
  An estimate of the upper limit of an earthquake is approximately 10. It's a function of max rock strength.
  - selectodude 3y ago
    It’s actually a function of energy released. The earthquake can get bigger if the fault slip is larger. A magnitude 12 quake is technically possible but requires an entire hemisphere to slip 500 meters. There’s a really interesting paper that takes the moment magnitude scale to its logical extremes. PDF warning: https://www.fujipress.jp/main/wp-content/themes/Fujipress/pdf_subscribed.php https://www.fujipress.jp/main/wp-content/themes/Fujipress/pd...
bugbuddy 3y ago
Not necessarily because there may not be any difference between a wind speed of 350mph and 400mph wind in term of destructive power. Both may simply be able to strip the land bare and deliver the everything above it many miles away as well as temporarily moving parts of the sea miles inland.
sillywalk 3y ago
By the time storms of 7+ come that level become commonplace, I doubt there will be people track and name them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ComplexSystems 3y ago
While that is probably most sensible, it doesn't seem like a lot of fun. Instead, I recommend we call a new global conference, every few years, to discuss the addition of each individual natural number to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
- RugnirViking 3y ago
  That does sound fun! Is the idea to progress sequentially? or do we consider the proposal of 13 before 7 if there is enough support to do so?

rblatz 3y ago

Category 1 - 74-95 mph Category 2 - 96-110 mph Category 3 - 111-129 mph Category 4 - 130-156 mph Category 5 - 157 mph or higher I’m not sure why these divisions were made. The jumps between are seemingly arbitrary, from 27 mph to 15 mph and no pattern I can discern. What makes the next jump to 192 which is the largest jump yet?

yieldcrv 3y ago
I think its the damage that benign debris can do to a person at certain speed thresholds but I could be wrong
- senectus1 3y ago
  which seems weird when you consider the building materials and styles that different regions use.
Keyframe 3y ago
Like Fujita scale for Tornados, it's about potential for potential damage it can cause which is here dependent somehow on the wind speed variable. I'm sure someone more knowledgeable about it can explain how it's correlated, but it's not about wind speeds (alone).
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  Reminded of a joke by Ron White in the context of a person choosing to remain behind in a hurricane because they believe they can withstand the wind and rain: “It’s not that the wind is blowin’, it’s what the wind is blowin’.” On topic, it makes me wonder if the wind cutoffs have to do with what can be additionally picked up by the increase in energy. I’d honestly assume not but I would still hesitate to assume that it’s arbitrary. Not really sure but the phrasing of the joke made me wonder.
  - Keyframe 3y ago
    This made me interested as well. Why the exact cut-offs, right? I found few resources like NOAA https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/sshws.pdf https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/sshws.pdf and wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir%E2%80%93Simpson_scale saying basically about the wind speed that the actual wind speed is "sustained winds as average winds over a period of one minute, measured at the same 33 ft (10.1 m) height" and then I thought ok if this scalar we're using is correlated to potential damage, that would mean force, right? They did remove air pressure and storm surges as components later on. I didn't bother with air pressure outside of standard since it would deviate a lot into researching exactly that. Since it's not really my domain, I decided to wing it by googling around and looked for wind force formulas. One that I found out ( https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2017/09/07/hurricane-wind-force-increases-as-the-square-of-the-velocity/#:~:text=The%20Force%20on%20a%20unit,F%20%3D%20r%20V%5E2 https://sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2017/09/07/hurricane-wi.... ) can roughly be translated as F = v^2 but then when I charted it out with x being wind speed and y proportional force, only thing I found out was that it looked logarithmic (which I didn't need a chart for lol ). The other I found was saying for wind load formula "The generic formula for wind load is F = A x P x Cd where F is the force or wind load, A is the projected area of the object, P is the wind pressure, and Cd is the drag coefficient." I had to hunt for variables here, but gist of it is that since scale is in mph I went USA with 1 square foot for A - area (and then to square meters from that, 0,093 m^2), wind speed to m/s, and went with these (more googling): Wind Pressure (P) is P = 0.5 x p x V^2 where p (rho actually) is air density (google: 1.225 kg/m^3 at sea level and 15C, I couldn't find one at 10m height), V is our wind speed, and Cd (drag coefficient) for a flat plate which is 1.28 according to https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/airplane/shaped.html#:~:text=A%20flat%20plate%20has%20Cd,07%20to%20 https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/VirtualAero/BottleRocket/a.... tl;dr; I couldn't find clear cuts in Newtons. I tried minimum, maximum and average wind speeds for each categories, and then I kind of lost interest there. More googling says that it was based on established observations what wind force can do to structures, but no more than that and I couldn't source original work to see more details. Outside of optics, this is as far as my physics will lead me tonight. I'd be highly interested to see if anyone more in the know can provide methodology behind it, be it from meteorology, construction, or fluid dynamics.

unethical_ban 3y ago

It's nothing new to talk about, but rating a hurricane's destructive force on windspeed alone is sub-optimal. On the other side, one-dimensional labels for a storm help convey the severity of it quickly and unambiguously. Hurricanes have three components IIRC (as someone who lived on the coast a long time): Storm surge flooding, rain flooding, and wind. Hurricane Ike was a cat2 in 2008, which did significant damage to the Houston coast because of its large storm surge. Harvey in 2017 was damaging due to its consistent rain over the area as it stalled. Tropical storm Allison in 2001 was similar. One may argue that wind causes the most acute damage as well as the fastest "change in status" of the three: High winds can topple a tree to block a road instantly, or rip the roof from a house in a flash, or knock down powerlines taking out a neighborhood. While I'm not against a cat 6 or higher rating existing, for the sake of human communication "cat 5" means "get the hell out of there" already.

pjot 3y ago
> Storm surge flooding, rain flooding, and wind I use wind and the speed of the storm directionally as my mental model when thinking about hurricanes. Rain/surge flooding are results of how long the system is over an area. That said if a storm is a 3+ I’ll leave - driving 3-4 hours is way more enjoyable than trying to sleep with no AC
metaphor 3y ago
> Hurricane Ike was a cat2 in 2008, which did significant damage to the Houston coast because of its large storm surge. > Harvey in 2017 was damaging due to its consistent rain over the area as it stalled. The outsider impression that I took away was that a major reason why Houston got so rekt by a mere Cat 2 hurricane was in large part driven by property developers building communities in low lying areas that the Army Corp of Engineers had designated as "emergency spillways"[1][2]...the Army knew about the risk, the city turned a blind eye, and the devil in the details weren't disclosed to homebuyers. Perhaps there's more to the story? > While I'm not against a cat 6 or higher rating existing, for the sake of human communication "cat 5" means "get the hell out of there" already. I agree, but skipping town isn't always an option even if you wanted to; experienced two such events[3][4] on Guam as a kid. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/us/houston-harvey-flooding-reservoir.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/22/us/houston-ha... [2] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2021/how-houston-floods/ https://www.houstonchronicle.com/projects/2021/how-houston-f... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Omar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Omar [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Paka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Paka

wpollock 3y ago

The problem with this is that wind speed alone is not a good indicator of how destructive a storm can be. Storm surge, mud slides, etc., contribute and can be deadly even in a category 1 or 2 storm. If the scale is to be updated, it would be beneficial to include other factors in addition to wind speed.

bombcar 3y ago
Wind speed is measurable before landfall, many other destructive indicators are only so after the destruction is done.
- interestica 3y ago
  The enhanced fujita scale for tornadoes takes into account an assessment of damage after the fact to make a guess of the wind speeds that were produced. An after-the-fact assessment of hurricanes could be useful in creating a categorization that better communicates risk to persons than just windspeed.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Maybe, but the Fujita scale can greatly under report strength, because the higher grades need to be justified by damage to modern, well built structures. There are tons of tornadoes that meteorologists are sure are at least EF-4 based on Doppler and video, but are rated at EF-1 or EF-2 because they didn’t hit anything but cornfields and sheds.
    - basil-rash 3y ago
      Isn’t that the system working as-designed? We don’t really need to blast the alarm for a few stalks getting bent out of shape.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        It can lead to a false sense of security... maybe if it turns east instead of north east it barrels into downtown Omaha. In the most extreme case a small tornado in a larger storm that hits no man-built structures may go totally unrecorded. Essentially if you assess tornado risk as something like (frequency * severity) / area, this will under assess risk to a previously developed area that is now being developed. Before there was nothing to hit. Now there is.

stubish 3y ago

I had previously heard that category 5 storms were originally thought to be impossible, and only became possible due to global warming adding more energy into the atmosphere. The article however states that category 6 was technically possible as far back as 1979. Have these category 5, 6 and maybe higher always been possible, but just more improbable?

TylerE 3y ago
There were 19th century storms that were clearly 5s, at least. Whoever told you that didn’t know that the hell they were talking about, to put it mildly.

interestica 3y ago

> The question of whether a category 6 would be an effective communication tool requires a larger discussion, with input from social scientists, psychologists, emergency managers, and city planners, Kossin said. Or, communications professionals! I would love to see more emphasis on science communications. The article touches on the fact that the Saffir-Simpson scale kinda over-relies on arbitrary windspeeds as its categorization factor. It doesn't take into account the potential damage from storm surges and flooding. (Also, as the comedian Ron White has remarked, it's not that the wind blows, but what the wind blows.[1]) Does a human have any way of conceptualizing the difference of 178-208 km/h (cat4) versus 252+ km/h (cat5) hurricane? Instead, there's an over reliance on the number -- perpetuated by how news media portray the storms. In October 2023 residents of Acapulco, Mexico were told that a Category 1 hurricane was approaching. It rapidly intensified to a cat 5 within a day and residents were totally unprepared.[2] Did residents even know "rapid intensification" was even possible? Is the potential for rapid intensification due to warming waters the thing we should be communicating rather than "category numbers"? In 2007 they updated the 'Fujita Scale' for Tornadoes (Now the 'Enhanced Fujita Scale') to better incorporate assessed damage.[3] Do we need some sort of update to the Saffir-Simpson scale that better takes into account potential/assessed damage? (Especially as it relates to the flooding/storm surge aspects). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQD7Fzid1xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQD7Fzid1xI [2] https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/information/data-in-action?title=What%20caused%20Hurricane%20Otis%20to%20intensify%20so%20rapidly%3F https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/information/data-in-action?title=... [3] https://www.weather.gov/oun/efscale https://www.weather.gov/oun/efscale edit: In terms of what the wind blows: an equivalent category storm that hits Jamaica versus one that hits Houston will likely produce very different levels of damage purely due to the difference in infrastructure types. Yet, both regions are warned with the same "category number."

bobthepanda 3y ago
This is also similar to the difference between Moment Magnitude vs Modified Mercalli or Shindo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_seismic_intensity_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_se...

ggreer 3y ago

I am skeptical of this paper. If you go to Wikipedia's list of most intense tropical cyclones[1] and sort by barometric pressure, there doesn't seem to be much correlation with time. The biggest and most intense tropical cyclone is still Typhoon Tip in 1979.[2] If you read the actual study[3], it looks like they do a lot of data manipulation and simulation to come to their conclusion. They subtract 15 meters/sec from wind speeds measured before 1973, claiming a bias in measurements from that time. This causes a huge step up in lifetime maximum intensity in the 1970s. Their estimates of future category 6 probabilities are from simulations that they admit don't simulate current conditions correctly. I think it's more likely than not that tropical cyclones are getting more intense, and that they're hitting places that didn't typically get hit in the past, but I don't find this paper convincing. It really feels like they cajoled the data to fit their conclusion. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_intense_tropical_cyclones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_intense_tropi... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Tip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Tip 3. https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2308901121

PM_me_your_math 3y ago
[flagged]
- Grokker 3y ago
  [flagged]
BeefWellington 3y ago
In fairness though, they didn't just make up their bias assertion; it's in other published works[1] and there is real evidence that old measurements were incorrect (biased towards the high side) when compared to other available contemporary measurements. [1]: Landsea, C. W. Mon. Weath. Rev. 121, 1703–1714 (1993) - https://journals.ametsoc.org/configurable/content/journals$002fmwre$002f121$002f6$002f1520-0493_1993_121_1703_acoima_2_0_co_2.xml?t%3Aac=journals%24002fmwre%24002f121%24002f6%24002f1520-0493_1993_121_1703_acoima_2_0_co_2.xml&tab_body=pdf https://journals.ametsoc.org/configurable/content/journals$0...

dskrvk 3y ago

This is exactly the premise of Bruce Sterling’s novel “Heavy Weather”.

irrelative 3y ago

Classic spinal tap. “These go to eleven.”

jcalx 3y ago

For futureproofing, we should extend the scale to cover hypercanes [1], which (according to Wikipedia): - require ocean temperatures of 120 °F (50 °C) - have sustained winds of 500 mph (800 km/h) - have barometric pressures in their centers sufficiently low enough to cause altitude sickness - may persist for several weeks due to above low pressure - may be as large as North America or as small as 15 mi (25 km) — Wikipedia has an unhelpful caption about the size of the "average hypercane" (!) - extend into the upper stratosphere, unlike today's hurricanes (lower stratosphere) - due to above height, may sufficiently degrade the ozone layer with water vapor to the point of causing (an additional) hazard to planetary life As of today, both a hypercane and a regular, run-of-the-mill catastrophic hurricane would be rated a Category 5. But I suppose hurricane categorization and nomenclature would be the least of NOAA's problems in such an event. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane

Nevermark 3y ago
> But I suppose hurricane categorization and nomenclature would be the least of NOAA's problems in such an event. This is implausible to me. Just to be safe, we should get the naming done up front.

zgs 3y ago

I'm skeptical about one of the opening sentences in the article: "category 5 underestimates actual risk". Category 5 cyclones/hurricanes are already assumed to essentially destroy everything in their path. This will still be true regardless of how strong the winds get. Having experienced several lower category cyclones, there really isn't a lot to do except 1/ evacuate if you've got time and a place to go or 2/ bunker down and pray. It's just luck that I've not experienced a direct hit from a higher category storm.

sidlls 3y ago

I’ve been in cat 1 and cat 2 storms. They’re awesome in their power for destruction. I’ve evacuated from a category 4 storm, which did a huge amount of damage in the city when it hit. A category 5 storm is essentially going to destroy everything in its path already. What good would adding a 6th category do?

nscalf 3y ago
I lived in Florida for a long time, I can tell you that people don’t evacuate when it’s a cat 4 threatening to maybe become a cat 5. Having a category meaning “this is much worse than a 4” would be meaningful here. I see no reason to have an upper limit, it just artificially makes everything at and above the cat 5 threshold mean the same thing. Also, Florida homes are built from cement, meant to survive storms like that. The building codes come from hurricane andrew, a particularly damaging cat 5.
- Beldin 3y ago
  > Having a category meaning “this is much worse than a 4” would be meaningful here. But don't you think that cat 5 would become the new 4? That is: why do you think extending the scale will expand the range of warnings communicated, instead of smearing the existing range out over more values?
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > don't you think that cat 5 would become the new 4? The few who might be saved are worth it. We can’t keep optimising for saving idiots.
- matwood 3y ago
  Florida gonna Florida. I grew up and still live in a hurricane area. Went through a cat 5 as a kid - not going to do that again. But, cat 2/3 or less I'm not going anywhere. Last time we took a direct cat 2, we didn't even lose power. Like you said, FL and really most of the southeast coast learned from Andrew. Simple changes like roof ties and more expensive ones like cement plank siding make a pretty significant difference [1]. TBH, my main concern in a storm is water. My house is ~12' off the ground and given its location, if there's water in the house we're basically in an end of days, biblical level storm. [1] https://www.usglassmag.com/30-years-later-hurricane-andrew-redesigned-modern-building-codes/ https://www.usglassmag.com/30-years-later-hurricane-andrew-r...

anArbitraryOne 3y ago

Next thing you know they'll be trying to make category 7 hurricanes official

okokwhatever 3y ago

Another Emergency to take care of. This is the reason why TV/movies lost mojo since a decade ago, its a better entertainment to wait for the next emergency (and read about it in the media) than waiting for the next blockbuster.

obblekk 3y ago

This might be true but paradoxically, there hasn’t been an observed frequency or intensity of Florida hurricanes in last 100 years [1]. Florida is worth looking at because they were industrialized and have had relatively robust meteorological record for the entire period. I do wonder why as it seems like common sense that heating air and water temps (which have happened) would cause more evaporation and potential for water and wind storms. [1] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/ https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

nraynaud 3y ago

As a wertern European, the first time I converted wind speeds from a US hurricane, I thought I fumbled the maths, it was like 100kph/60mph higher than our winter storms. I since learned that the storm scale and the hurricane scale are different, and we simply don't have hurricanes here, we never see real crazy wind speeds and we don't use the hurricane scale at all.

albrewer 3y ago
The aftermath of a hurricane is like nothing you've ever experienced - there's something deeply unsettling about all the trees in a forest being bent uniformly in one direction, or entire neighborhoods completely erased. 285 km/h sustained winds comes out to roughly 3.8 kpa pressure on all surfaces. So for every 1m^2 of surface area perpendicular to the wind direction, you're getting ~350kgf applied.
djmips 3y ago
In the Pacific Northwest, we get extra bad wind storms around every 30 years. The storm in 1993 was 60-75 mph and going back to 1921 a storm was 115 mph with gusts to 150 mph. What's it like in Western Europe?
- nraynaud 3y ago
  I'd say Lothar was a very big recent one, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Lothar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Lothar (albeit the name, cyclones don't develop if the ocean water is less than 26°C, and let me tell you that there was a solid 15-20°C margin in the zone). Germany had some solid gust speeds, but when you look at France, it's not biting that much in the 100mph.
LorenPechtel 3y ago
Hurricanes require big patches of warm ocean to feed on--they can leave such areas but they will weaken with time if they don't have warm ocean to feed on. Furthermore, northern-hemisphere hurricanes will in general move northeast, your water is to the west.
3y ago

partitioned 3y ago

I like how this is basically scientists arguing about tier lists. The stats tell the story but people just love to rank things.

miller_joe 3y ago

I just happen to be reading Peter F. Hamilton's Confederation universe (1996–2000) trilogy and in it earth has been dealing with the "Armada storms" for a couple hundred years due to climate change. From the descriptions there are multiple of these storms occurring at any given time. Humans now live in "arcologies" which are giant multi-kilometer domes over population centers. There was no way to reverse the damage done. We can't fly anymore so everything is in a very fast underground train system called "vac-trains". I suppose this may be where we are headed (although I'd rather love to see the vac-train system)

lawlessone 3y ago
That one's the Edenist Universe or the MorningLightMountain universe?
- miller_joe 3y ago
  Edenists. MLM is the Commonwealth Saga, if I recall. First book “Pandora’s Star”

xg15 3y ago

There is already lots of discussion about science communication in this thread, but I think what would also be extremely important is good communication after the scale has changed. Should there be a decision to extend the scale, the fact that there was a change should be communicated as widely as possible: Make it an item in the evening news, put a footnote in every article that uses the term "category 6 hurricane" for a few months, etc. Explain exactly when the scale was changed, who made the decision and on what grounds. Because if not, this will be an open flank for climate denialists: I think the "natural" tendency of most media outlets would be to just quote press releases or forecasts verbatim and use the new term as if it had always been there. To uninformed viewers, this would give the impression that either the scale always went to 6 and they just somehow never noticed or that the scale was open-ended and we're now getting the first cat6 hurricanes because of climate change. Both assumptions are obviously wrong, and so a climate denialist will gleefully pull out their "research" that the scale has been changed as evidence of manipulation and conspiracy. I think this is something that should strongly be avoided.

groovimus 3y ago

So my question would be, if the paper is logically sound then we are looking at a mechanism where the energy boost from increasing ocean temperatures is only applicable to the storms of cat 5. Why? Because we have data that show the yearly frequency of named tropical cyclones. The chart of these fequencies from 1980~2022 which I link below, indicates no discernable trend. This means that the postulated increase in storm intensity is somehow not promoting otherwise 'would-be' tropical storms into the cyclone categories. Consider the energy distribution over the 5 categories. So this leaves us with, if the logic of the paper is verified, a situation where only the kurtosis of that distribution is affected by ocean temperature -- and not any other statistial parameters. So this should be a future topic for study, why only the higher energy storms are enhanced and not the lower energy ones. In other words why is the kurtosis of this distribution enhanced by increasing ocean temperature? link: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269915/number-named-storms-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1269915/number-named-sto...