Due to climate change on Earth, hurricanes may become so powerful that it will be necessary to introduce a new category to classify such disasters.
Publika.az According to Qaynarinfo, this conclusion was reached by American climatologists of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The research was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The current Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale includes five categories: 1 (33-42 m/s) to 5 (more than 70 m/s).
Scientists at the Lawrence Laboratory presented a hypothetical category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which includes storms with winds of more than 85 meters per second.
“Our goal is to rethink how the openness of the Saffir-Simpson scale can lead to risk underestimation, and how this underestimation becomes increasingly problematic under warming conditions,” said Michael Wehner, one of the authors of the paper.
Climatologists have noted that anthropogenic global warming has caused a significant increase in the temperature of the tropospheric air and ocean surface in regions where hurricanes, tropical cyclones and typhoons form.
The team analyzed historical hurricane data from 1980 to 2021 and found five Category 6 hurricanes, all of which occurred in the past nine years.
The researchers also ran simulations to see how a warming climate would affect hurricane intensity. Their models showed that with global warming 2°C above pre-industrial levels, the risk of a Category 6 storm would increase by 50% near the Philippines and double in the Gulf of Mexico.
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