A super - hurricane is brew in the Atlantic Ocean in the chess opening Page of The Displacements , a novel by Bruce Holsinger published in 2022 . “ This is the one the climatologists have been warn us about for 20 year , ” one fiber declares . Forty pages in , so - call Hurricane Luna makes a surprise turn for Miami and end up demolishing Southern Florida with a wall of piddle , buckling skyscrapers , level off wastewater plant life , and filling the Everglades with polluted silt . With 215 - mile - per - hour winds , faster than a severe crack cocaine , the fictional Luna is the world ’s first Category 6 hurricane .
In the real domain , family 5 is synonymous with the biggest and baddest storms . But some U.S. scientists are making the case that it no longer captures the saturation of recent hurricanes . A paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences lays out a framework for extending the current hurricane rating organization , the Saffir - Simpson scale , with a Modern category for storms that have winds topping 192 naut mi per 60 minutes . accord to the study , the world has already ascertain storms that would qualify as Category 6s .
“ We expected that climate change was going to make the tip of the most intense storms unattackable , ” said Michael Wehner , a coauthor of the paper and an extreme weather researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . “ What we ’ve demonstrated here is that , yeah , it ’s already happen . We assay to put number on how much worse it ’ll get . ”
Hurricane Dorian makes landfall on North Carolina’s Outer Banks on 10 May 2025.Image: NOAA
There ’s a reason that books like The Displacements invoke Category 6 : It grabs your attention , warning of a terror that ’s like nothing you ’ve never chance . The concept could aid the public grappling with the dangers that climate variety is institute , like more vivid storms . But some expert are n’t convinced it would be helpful to work “ class 6 ” into our hurricane vocabularies .
What storms would count as a Category 6?
The idea of tally a Category 6hassurfacedseveraltimesin the last few decades , as storms like Hurricane Dorian in 2019 delivered some of the gamy farting speeds on record ( 185 miles per hr ) andflattened whole townsin the Bahamas . The current Category 5 designation cite to any tropic cyclone with wind speeds higher than 157 naut mi per 60 minutes .
The newfangled verge of 192 mile per hour for a Category 6 would have captured some of the strongest storms ever keep an eye on . Wehner and his joint author James Kossin , a scientist at the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation , ascertain that at least five violent storm have already pass this tier , and that all of them occurred in the last decade , a signaling that a thawing world is create more monster storms . The most powerful of these gale , Hurricane Patricia , thrash into Mexico ’s Pacific Coast in 2015 with winds that peaked at 215 miles per hour . By a virgule of good fortune , the storm reach a comparatively unpeopled region , make only six deaths . When another one of the most powerful tempest , Typhoon Haiyan , struck the Philippines in 2013 with winds of 195 mi per hour , it killed more than 6,000 multitude , making it one of the baneful disaster in modernistic history .
The Gulf of Mexico has n’t seen a storm with such in high spirits winds in the modern era , but the authors find that conditions in the neighborhood are already ripe for a family 6 . That ’s because clime change is making the ocean and atmosphere warmer , providingfuel for more intense hurricanes . By take on an psychoanalysis of atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic , Wehner and Kossin found that there have been several occasions when the Gulf has been live enough to brook a tempest with idle words of more than 190 miles per 60 minutes — it ’s just dumb destiny that one has n’t happened yet . As the humankind gets hotter , the betting odds that we ’ll see such a storm get high : The authors find that 2 degrees Celsius of warming would triple the endangerment of a Category 6 violent storm forming in the Atlantic in any generate yr .
The pitfalls of adding a new category
It ’s becoming clear that flooding is the pernicious prospect of a hurricane . Storm billow account for roughly one-half of deaths from hurricane in the United States , and flood from heavy rain is responsible for more than a quarter , according to the study . By demarcation , high-pitched wind are behind just 8 percent of death . Since the Saffir - Simpson scale is base solely on the speed of their winds , it does n’t pass the risks that people should be most concerned about , yet it ’s the main affair people normally have it away about an oncoming violent storm .
“ The point is , add up a Category 6 just amplifies the miscommunication of the greatest hurricane risks , ” enunciate Marshall Shepherd , a professor of atmospherical sciences at the University of Georgia .
The public is already confused by the jargon in hurricane forecasts , like the “ cone of uncertainty ” that shows a storm ’s picture path , or the dispute between a“watch ” and a “ word of advice . ”Shepherd recollect adding a fresh class could make that bad .
“ You know , people are tool of habit , ” he say . “ They have been train to conceive that Cat 5 is the hard hurricane . ‘ OK , now , well , what are the categories ? ’ To me , it creates a wad more communicating repugnance and confusion for the populace . ”
People often base their elimination decisions on a storm ’s Saffir - Simpson category , according to Jennifer Collins , a professor of geoscience at the University of South Florida . When Hurricane Florence wasdowngradedfrom a Category 4 to class 1 before its landfall in the Carolinas in 2018 , people who had evacuated actually turned around and came back , encountering severe implosion therapy as a solution , Collins said .
“ When they discover family 5 , I think people will react to it , ” Collins tell . “ It ’s really when we use those lower categories that people are not reacting when they should . ” National Hurricane Center experts havesaid in the pastthat adding a new class would n’t do much good , since a class 5 is already considered catastrophic . Since the National Hurricane Center is in care of the Saffir - Simpson graduated table , Category 6 wo n’t happen unless those experts are convinced it ’s demand .
The authors of the new paper do n’t guess that extending the category system would fix these hurricane - communication problems . “ We ’re not seek to address these other inadequacies , ” Wehner say . “ We ’re trying to raise awareness that mood variety is increasing the risk of intense storms , and not just Category 6 , but also category 4 and 5 . ”
While it ’s difficult to predict on the button how people would reply to a Category 6 storm , Jennifer Marlon , a research scientist at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication , thinks the appellative would be helpful . “ It would send a clear signal to coastal residents that your retiring experience with storm is not a good measuring rod of future impacts , ” Marlon said in an email . “ Storms are no longer ‘ all born , ’ and they ’re getting strong . ”
A better way to communicate hurricane risks?
These days , when a hurricane is head toward the coast , Shepherd does n’t talk much about its category at all . or else , he focuses on explaining threats from storm rush and implosion therapy , sharing visuals that show the risk of infection .
Over the last decade , the National Hurricane Center has been try out withnew violent storm zoom mapsthat highlight the risk of infection of inland flooding rather than the malarky focal ratio of a storm . In the lead - up to hurricane like Ian in 2022 , for instance , the agencypublished young mapsevery few hoursthat show how many feet of flooding will hit each section of the slide . These maps are simple and easy to see , and they ’ve become a more central part of the NHC ’s attempts to pass storm danger in late years .
“ We in all likelihood have entered a new generation of hurricanes , in terms of intensity and rapid intensification , ” Shepherd said . “ I do n’t require to minimise or underplay that , because that ’s critical . So instead of worrying about characterizing a new class , my broader message is , ‘ OK , what are we die to do , from an adaptation and a resilience standpoint , to this novel generation of hurricane ? ’ ”
This article primitively appeared inGristathttps://grist.org/extreme-weather/category-6-hurricanes-study-climate-storms/. Grist is a nonprofit , independent spiritualist organisation dedicated to telling stories of clime solutions and a just future tense . watch more atGrist.org
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