Some other experts have come out and said a sixth category is unnecessary and would cause confusion since hurricanes are categorized by wind speed and not by rain and flooding.A handful of super powerful tropical storms in the last decade and the prospect of more to come has a couple of experts proposing a new category.
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weeklySince 2013, five storms — all in the Pacific — had winds of 192 mph or higher that would have put them in the new category, with two hitting the. As the world warms, conditions grow more ripe for such whopper storms, including in the Gulf of Mexico, where many storms that hit the United States get stronger, the study authors said.
Storms of sufficient wind speed are called hurricanes if they form east of the international dateline, and typhoons if they form to the west of the line. They're known as cyclones in the Indian Ocean and— 2020's Typhoon Goni, which reached 195 mph before killing dozens in the Philippines as a weaker storm.
Pacific storms are stronger because there's less land to weaken them and more room for storms to grow more intense, unlike the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, Kossin said. MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel said Wehner and Kossin “make a strong case for changing the scale,” but said it's unlikely to happen because authorities know most hurricane damage comes from storm surge and other flooding.