HURRICANESCategory 6-level Hurricanes Are Already Here, a New Study Says
Some U.S. scientists are making the case that the current storm classification no longer captures the intensity of recent hurricanes. They argue for extending the current hurricane rating system, the Saffir-Simpson scale, with a new category for storms that have winds topping 192 miles per hour, saying that the world has already seen storms that would qualify as Category 6s. But what would change if we added a number to the hurricane scale?
A super-hurricane is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean in the opening pages of The Displacements, a novel by Bruce Holsinger published in 2022. “This is the one the climatologists have been warning us about for 20 years,” one character declares. Forty pages in, so-called Hurricane Luna makes a surprise turn for Miami and ends up demolishing Southern Florida with a wall of water, buckling skyscrapers, leveling wastewater plants, and filling the Everglades with contaminated silt. With 215-mile-per-hour winds, faster than a severe tornado, the fictional Luna is the world’s first Category 6 hurricane.
In the real world, Category 5 is synonymous with the biggest and baddest storms. But some U.S. scientists are making the case that it no longer captures the intensity 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 system, the Saffir-Simpson scale, with a new category for storms that have winds topping 192 miles per hour. According to the study, the world has already seen storms that would qualify as Category 6s.
“We expected that climate change was going to make the winds of the most intense storms stronger,” 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 happening. We tried to put numbers on how much worse it’ll get.”
There’s a reason that books like The Displacements invoke Category 6: It grabs your attention, warning of a threat that’s like nothing you’ve never encountered. The concept could help the public grapple with the dangers that climate change is bringing, like more intense storms. But some experts aren’t convinced it would be helpful to work “Category 6” into our hurricane vocabularies.
What Storms Would Count as a Category 6?
The idea of adding a Category 6 has surfaced several times in the last few decades, as storms like Hurricane Dorian in 2019 delivered some of the highest wind speeds on record (185 miles per hour) and flattened whole towns in the Bahamas. The current Category 5 designation refers to any tropical cyclone with wind speeds higher than 157 miles per hour.
