Milton’s race from a Category 2 to a Category 5 hurricane in just a few hours has left people wondering if the powerhouse storm could, or should, possibly become a Category 6.
As USA Today reports, hurricane grew very strong very fast Monday after forming in the Gulf of Mexico, exploding from a 60-mph tropical storm Sunday morning to a powerhouse 180-mph Category 5 hurricane − an eye-popping increase of 130 mph in 36 hours.
The rapidly developing hurricane that shows no signs of stopping can’t technically become a Category 6 – but only because the category doesn’t exist at the moment. But it could soon reach the level of a hypothetical Category 6 experts have discussed and stir up arguments about whether the National Hurricane Center’s long-used scale for classifying hurricane wind speeds from Category 1 to 5 might need an overhaul.
Milton is already in rarefied air by surpassing 156 mph winds to become a Category 5. But if it reaches wind speeds of 192 mph, it will surpass a threshold that just five hurricanes and typhoons have reached since 1980, according to Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jim Kossin, a retired federal scientist and science advisor at the nonprofit First Street Foundation. The pair authored a study looking at whether the extreme storms could become the basis of a Category 6 hurricane denomination. All five of the storms occurred over the previous decade.
The scientists say some of the more intense cyclones are being supercharged by record warm waters fueled by climate change in the world’s oceans, especially in the Gulf of Mexico and parts of Southeast Asia and the Philippines. Kossin and Wehner said they weren’t proposing adding a Category 6 to the wind scale but were trying to “inform broader discussions” about communicating the growing risks in a warming world.
Other weather experts hope to see wind speed categories de-emphasized, saying they don’t adequately convey a hurricane’s broader potential impacts such as storm surge and inland flooding. The worst of the damage from Helene came when the storm reached the Carolinas and had already been downgraded from a hurricane to a tropical storm.
What is the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale?
The hurricane center has used the well-known scale – with wind speed ranges for each of five categories – since the 1970s. The minimum threshold for Category 5 winds is 157 mph.
Designed by engineer Herbert Saffir and adapted by former center director Robert Simpson, the scale stops at Category 5 since winds that high would “cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it’s engineered,” Simpson said during a 1999 interview.
The open-ended Category 5 describes anything from “a nominal Category 5 to infinity,” Kossin said. “That’s becoming more and more inadequate with time because climate change is creating more and more of these unprecedented intensities.”
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