Am I the only one who was expecting a backwards compatible Category 5e?
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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First thought was, "Is this really necessary? How far past Cat 5 are we seeing?"
the Category 6 label could go to any tropical cyclone with sustained winds of at least 192 mph — an intensity that five storms have surpassed since 2013
JFC. 35mph faster than a top Cat 5?! How many of y'all been in a hurricane? We had a top-end Cat 3 do a stunning amount of damage, makes most top-10 lists I've seen. Katrina hit 174mph, and I cannot describe the destruction. What you saw on the news was New Orleans, you did not see southern Mississippi.
NO was a humanitarian disaster, MS was... I don't have words. My ex-FIL earned 2 Bronze Stars in Iraq, 3 tours I think? He was fine. Came home and led his troops fighting their way in, cutting houses in half and pushing them off the road. The man got PTSD, divorced his wife of 32-years and stopped talking to his only child. Yeah, it was bad.
Ex and I drove through the blast area in Gulfport. Wild. Turned north and saw damage to just past Hattiesburg. That's 70-miles inland folks. For perspective, I'm 32-miles inland and don't expect much from a hurricane.
So just how fast are they going now?!
Katrina's winds had weakened to 125mph sustained when it made landfall.
There have been a bunch of 200mph+ ones:
Determining if Category-6-equivalent hurricanes are indeed beginning to ramp up in frequency because of climate change is hampered by our poor ability to observe intense hurricanes. To illustrate: Satellite measurements indicated that the Eastern Pacific’s Hurricane Patricia of 2015 was a Category 5 storm with about 180 mph winds. However, the Hurricane Hunters found that Patricia had peak winds of 205 mph during the time when their plane was in the storm. (Patricia continued to intensify after the Hurricane Hunters left, and is thought to have peaked with winds of an unimaginable 215 mph.) If the Hurricane Hunters had not collected this data, we may not have known whether Patricia had met the threshold of 195 mph winds needed to classify it as a Category 6.
Good naming conventions are flexible.
Id imagine if any prev hurricanes fit the requirements for Category 6, then they would be adjusted.
Thats the only issue for me, is its hard to have accurate data when you change metrics but dont adjust old data to match new metrics.