Hurricanes are getting so strong in a warming world that a Category 6 intensity should be added to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind scale, a new study finds.
Why it matters: The research shows how significantly climate change is altering storm intensity and other characteristics, as well as further underscoring the limitations of the scale.
Reality check: The paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does not represent an official move by the National Hurricane Center to add another hurricane category.
Afaik the hurricane categories go up to 10, but the category stops mattering after a certain level because there’s no construction standards that can withstand the winds once hurricanes are on that level or above.
You might be thinking of the Richter Scale for measuring earthquakes, that goes from 1-9.9 (a 10 might theoretically be possible if some enormous faults around the Pacific were to rupture all at once)
The saffir-simpson scale we normally use for hurricanes only goest from 1-5.
It’s also kind of a shitty scale because it only accounts for average sustained windspeed and not things like precipitation, storm surge, the size of the hurricane, or even the actual maximum windspeed. It’s also not a continuous scale, you can’t have a category 4.5 for example, storms at the upper and lower end of a category are pretty much exactly the same as far as you can tell from the the scale.
Richter is infinite, positive and negative.
https://youtu.be/e3uk7jU3RHo?si=iPOzm24r-Uok-cW1