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Hurricane category 6 could be introduced under new storm severity scale
- bigmattystyles 1y ago"These go to 11"
- Esophagus4 1y agoCouldn’t you just make 5 1 stronger?
- bitwrangler 1y agoI love that movie, and that scene. ha ha. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xgx4k83zzc
- cranberryturkey 1y ago[flagged]
- Hikikomori 1y agoGore, Obama, Bernie.
- cranberryturkey 1y agoyup. we'd be living great.
- _heimdall 1y agoWe don't know what Gore or Bernie would have done once in office or how the world would have responded differently to those presidencies. We could be living great, it could have gone even worse, or more likely it could just be different.
- johnklos 1y agoWe do know. Don't both-sides here.
- _heimdall 1y agoThat seems like a common trope recently. How am I both sides-ing this? Edit: trope may not be the right term here. "Don't both sides it" is a baseless claim meant to shut down a discussion rather than refute, debate, or discuss it.
- Arainach 1y agoIt could not have "gone even worse". Anti-competence regimes are a disaster. Destroying America's alliances, international relations, leadership, soft power, environment, leadership in renewable energy, and more are all disasters that will take decades to recover from if ever (I'm personally leading towards Pax Americana being over and never recovering).
- hedora 1y agoWe do know that Gore would have been president in the absence of a corrupt judiciary. Our corrupt judiciary allowed all of the things you mentioned to happen.
- _heimdall 1y agoHow do we know that? We don't know what judicial appointments would have been made, we can only guess and assume they would have been better.
- hedora 1y agoGore won in Florida after the votes were counted, but Bush got the electoral college votes. No honest judge would rule with the majority of the current supreme court.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- trehalose 1y agoThis is not a "climate change is getting worse" story, as I think you're implying :/ (I don't entirely blame you--I doubt you read the article, but I do think the title is misleading.) This is just a story of "The current hurricane categorizing system has always failed to correlate very well with deaths and destruction, because it only factors in wind speed. A category 1 hurricane can sometimes be more disastrous than a higher-category hurricane."
- jmclnx 1y agoLast I heard from weather people, cat 6 is not really needed, wonder if that changed recently. With NOAA's cuts, the only way I think cat 6 will be add is Trump wants to be the one to create that level and scientists state it is not really needed :)
- kylehotchkiss 1y ago[flagged]
- macintux 1y agoProbably the other way around, so he can send FEMA and money to Florida and ignore blue states.
- ksherlock 1y agoNah, a hurricane that wipes out Mar-a-Lago will get the same FEMA attention as a hurricane that wipes out Club Bedminster.
- hedora 1y agoYou might want to read up on recent changes to FEMA. It’s now substantially (and intentionally) weaker than it was pre-Katrina. Trump more than rolled back all of the reforms that happened since then. Heck, in public statements, they patted themselves on the back for “job well done” when they were asked why they didn’t pick up the phone during or after the recent mass casualty event in Texas. I’m sure there’d be major federal responses and a special allocation of reconstruction funds if either of the Trump properties you mentioned got hit, but it wouldn’t happen via FEMA (and probably wouldn’t even go through congress).
- gosub100 1y ago[flagged]
- 1y ago
- jpm_sd 1y agoThey're just trying to compete with Ethernet.
- bombcar 1y agoPeople keep saying they need Car 6 hurricanes but I’m smart and know Cat 5e hurricanes are just fast enough for anyone.
- orev 1y agoIt’s my understanding that “category 5” means “total destruction”, which is why this hasn’t been done in the past. However if it helps to get the point across about climate change, it would be helpful for marketing purposes.
- _heimdall 1y agoSorry but that reason for a change feels very coercive. If cat 5 is intended to be total destruction, meaning that anything above the lower bounds for a cat 5 is indistinguishable, there should be no 6.
- trehalose 1y agoThat's not what this is. (The person you're responding to didn't read the article.) They're not looking to add a "total-er destruction" category; they're looking to replace the current scale with one that takes into account more factors than just wind speed, such as storm surge and flooding. Under the current scale, a category 1 hurricane can be deadlier and more destructive than a higher-category hurricane. They want to use a different scale that better indicates the dangers. It goes up to 6 when multiple factors rate 5 on each factor's specific scale under the proposed system. I think the title of this article is misleading and clickbaity. :/
- hedora 1y agoCategory 6 could also be useful in that it implies multiple threats to avoid. Evacuation strategies for a cat 5 that’s just storm surge is very different than one that is wind and rain. Either way you lose the city, but with the latter, moving to high ground won’t save you.
- bombcar 1y agoTotal destruction could be “total human-scale destruction”. You could have “geological changes” above that; reroutes rivers, moves mountains, etc.
- alehlopeh 1y ago
- adverbly 1y agoPower creep. They should just buff cat 1 and 2.
- jliptzin 1y agoThe average person should not even really pay attention to the category of the storm. That is mostly of scientific concern. It measures the maximum wind speed found at the relatively tiny center of circulation which may or may not have anything to do with how destructive the rest of the storm is hundreds of miles away from the center, as the article points out. That can also depend on things that have nothing to do with the storm itself, such as whether it’s impacting an area with lax building codes that is unprepared for storm surge. People should forget about that scale and focus on what local authorities are saying about the potential danger.
- varenc 1y agoI think you’re in total agreement with the authors of this new system. They’re simply making a new categorization system that is closer to a 1:1 mapping between the classification and what local authorities are saying about potential danger. It's easier to make the classification a better representation of danger than it is to convince people to ignore the rating and only listen to local authorities.
- jliptzin 1y agoThat’s true
- wtallis 1y agoIf you live on the coast, following the details of the forecasts and warnings is extremely important. But my experience living a little over 100 miles inland taught me that the hurricane category is a useful predictor to some extent: anything below category 3 would weaken enough on its way inland that it wasn't a higher risk than routine severe thunderstorms, and didn't require any special advance preparations. The winds would merely be coming from a different direction than usual for our area, and only the areas usually prone to flash flooding had to worry about the volume of rain. It's location-specific, but it is possible to usefully distill the local risk profile down to something where the hurricane category tells you whether it's time to start worrying about that storm.
- 1y ago
- eth0up 1y agoAs a Florida resident and native, I've been telling people for years to brace for a "Goreicane", which is a cat 6 named after Al. Irma reached +180mph before magically dwindling to a 3 (or weak 4?) just before landfall. By then, we were already without power, so stats were unknown. I made a safety box out of a toolbox into which I stuffed my cat and provisions, as I wore an old motorcycle helmet and combat boots clutching a bugout bag and bottle of courage. I really didn't expect to do well and had it hit as a super 5, I'd probably not be leaving this silly post. But cat 6 is real. We'll see it soon.
- WaltPurvis 1y agoYour recollection of Irma's intensity is not particularly accurate. It was never anywhere near 180 mph "just before landfall" unless you were in the Leeward Islands on September 6. Irma crossed the Florida Keys on September 10 as a weak category 4, with 130 mph winds, but it didn't dwindle to that weak category 4 status, it intensified to it. When it left Cuba and turned toward Florida, on September 9, it was only a category 2 (and there was nothing magical about why it dwindled to a category 2 — it was because it ran into Cuban terrain). It did weaken a bit, down to a 115 mph Cat 3, between the Keys and it's second landfall in Collier County. Hurricane Dorian, in 2019, was almost a "Cat 6" kind of experience for Florida. It made landfall in the Bahamas with 185 mph winds and then just parked itself there, barely moving, for 24+ hours, maintaining Cat 5 strength the whole time. If it had done that on Florida's east coast, as it was once forecast to, the economic destruction would have been unbelievable.
- eth0up 1y ago[flagged]
- eth0up 1y agoI re-read this thread thinking I may have been unnecessarily harsh. No. I am apparently supposed to forget my experience of being in the eye of Irma for over an hour, and presumably the hurricane altogether and all memories of my time within it and efforts to mitigate its aftermath - all because wunderboy pasted an AI summary of Irma's path in attempt to further belittle my little post, based on the profound impetus of imperfect punctuation. If HN can't call out this kind of desperate opportunism, lurking in strange places waiting to trounce on any opening to expose oneself as an erudite hero wielding an elaborate encyclopedic remedy to a misplaced comma, then your future here may involve many bots. And really, that should be the job of a bot - dealing with other bots or trivial wankers who stand tall and proud upon the bodies they've sucker punched. If so, a bot is welcome to take my place too.
- jcalx 1y agoFeels like something similar to the NFPA 704 safety square [0] — maybe they could copy that to mimic a relatively accepted "danger measurement" format. Also of interest: hypercanes [1], my hurricane-adjacent Interesting Wikipedia Deep Dive, 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 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFPA_704 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane
- BobbyTables2 1y agoInteresting thought experiment but if any significant area of the ocean was even 100F, much less 120F, I think we’d be cooked.
- throwaway290 1y agoas the article says, all you need is a volcano.
- josh_today 1y ago[dead]
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoI keep meaning to reread Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather, about a future where the climate is trashed & weather escalates. Amid this, a group of tornado chasers are trying to find the first "F6" class tornado. https://thierstein.net/index.php?view=article&id=355:bruce-sterling-heavy-weather&catid= https://thierstein.net/index.php?view=article&id=355:bruce-s... Different extreme weather but fun book.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoUp here, Sandy was a cat 2 or 3, but caused 70 billion dollars’ worth of damage, and killed a couple hundred people. Water did most of that damage. But about 30 years ago, Andrew swept across Florida like a giant roomba, and did a huge amount of damage. It was a cat 5. Wind did most of the damage. Not sure how they would reconcile these two types of mega-storms.
- wmichelin 1y agoIt sounds like under the new ratings, both would be much closer together. It sounds like the water damage caused by Sandy is not articulated in the current rating system. So Sandy might work out to be a 4 or a 5? Not 100% sure of course, but that is my interpretation of the article.
- js8 1y ago> Not sure how they would reconcile these two types of mega-storms. Maybe something like free energy in thermodynamics?
- mapmeld 1y agoSandy was only a category 1 when it hit NYC. This was a wakeup call and part of why there's been years of rebuilding and hardening of NY and NJ infrastructure afterward https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2012/11/21/what-hurricane-sandy-was-not/ https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2012/11/21/what...
- Grazester 1y agoYep.It this did much damage because places so far North East never experienced storm and so they never built with that in mind. In place that experience this kind of weather more often(some parts of the Caribbean), it would have been business as usual the next day and I speak from experience.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoNot so sure about that. There’s been some nasty storms, up here. They just happen infrequently. What made Sandy so bad, was timing. It hit at high tide, and mixed with another storm. Also, geography. The Long Island Sound (the water between Long Island and Connecticut) can act as a “funnel,” that concentrates storm surges, if the wind is from the northeast, and there’s a number of waterways and estuaries, along the South Shore, that normally act as buffers, but actually turned into concentrators, with Sandy. Several seaside communities got all but wiped out, with boats being docked into the kid’s second-story bedroom. Southmost Manhattan is mostly reclaimed land. That is naturally prone to flooding. It also has some of the most expensive real estate in the world, so any flooding is guaranteed to be pricey. Because of the timing issue, I’m skeptical that anyone could predict how bad it got.
- varenc 1y agoI believe this is the real paper for those curious: https://pure.lib.usf.edu/ws/portalfiles/portal/40758246/Adequately%20Reflecting%20the%20Severity%20of%20Tropical%20Cyclones%20Using%20the.pdf https://pure.lib.usf.edu/ws/portalfiles/portal/40758246/Adeq... This new rating system uses the old system and 2 new rating categories Wind (from old system, 1min sustained speeds) Cat 1: 33–42 m/s (~74–95 mph) Cat 2: 43–49 m/s (~96–110 mph) Cat 3: 50–58 m/s (~111–129 mph) Cat 4: 59–69 m/s (~130–156 mph) Cat 5: >70 m/s (>157 mph) Storm surge (peak surge height above tide) Cat 1: 0.75–1.54 m Cat 2: 1.55–2.34 m Cat 3: 2.35–3.14 m Cat 4: 3.15–3.99 m Cat 5: >4.00 m Accumulated rainfall (event total) Cat 1: 100–262 mm Cat 2: 263–425 mm Cat 3: 426–588 mm Cat 4: 589–749 mm Cat 5: >750 mm
- quodlibetor 1y agoAnd the following criteria: (a) The final category can never be lower than the highest hazard-based category; (b) The TCSS should adequately reflect the case of high potential risk of two or more hazards. We consider a hazard of high risk when its respect- ive category is classified as 3 or higher (equal to the definition for a Major Hurricane on the SSHWS). Whenever (at least) two high risk haz- ards have the same category value and the third hazard has a lower category value, the final category should increment the highest hazard- based category. This implies that a TC scoring a Category 3 on both wind and storm surge, and a Category 1 on rainfall, will be classified as a Category 4. (c) To warn the general public for an event with multiple extreme hazards, a high-risk TC can be classified as a Category 6 when either 1. at least two of the hazard-based categories are of Cat- egory 5; or 2. two categories are of Category 4, and one of Category 5.
- creatonez 1y agoThe National Hurricane Center has figured out pretty well how to depict hurricane danger to the public, but a lot of people don't bother to pay attention to it and go for noisy sources instead. I think it's a good example for how to prioritize important information in general. Every few hours, they put out a selection of graphics: - A "Key messages" graphic with 2-4 bullet points about what is going on, what is predicted to happen, and specific dangers to look out for. The tone of the text is carefully adjusted for how life-threatening the situation is. This graphic also includes a copy of the two most important visualizations on the right. (Example: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?product=key_messages https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?pr...) - A peak storm surge graphic showing predicted coastal inundation and destructive wave action (Example: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?product=peak_surge https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?pr...) - A cone to depict the range of predictions for where the hurricane could go, ideally without a confusing line drawn in the center prediction (Example: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?product=3day_cone_no_line_and_wind https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?pr...) Arguably this could be replaced with a spaghetti model map, but these can be just as confusing for those unaware of how predictions are depicted. - A map of the most likely arrival time for hurricane force winds (Example: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?product=most_likely_toa_no_wsp_34 https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2024/HELENE_graphics.php?pr...) - After the main risks are over, a map of continued flash flood and river flooding risk (Example: https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/authoring/authoring-images/2024/09/26/USAT/75393852007-helene-flood-risk.png https://www.usatoday.com/gcdn/authoring/authoring-images/202...) - A no-frills ad-free weather report livestreamed to social media, so you can gauge how much the pros at the very top level of hurricane meteorology are freaking out about it (Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFL-nbFs2Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFL-nbFs2Xs) - A few other graphics and data dumps primarily intended for meteorologists, local officials, and nerds
- ItCouldBeWorse 1y ago[dead]