Hurricane Florence Is Exposing Major Problems With How We Categorize Storms

Hurricane Florence, once a Category 4 storm, was downgraded to Category 1 before it made landfall near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina early Friday morning. But experts say that despite the apparent demotion, Hurricane Florence still stands to be a destructive and deadly storm for those in its path. “Just because the wind speeds came down … please do not let your guard down,” Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Brock Long said at a press conference Thursday, during which he highlighted dangers like flooding from storm surge. “This is a very dangerous storm. Storm surge is why many of you have been placed under evacuation and we are asking citizens to please heed a warning. Your time is running out.” Indeed, Hurricane Florence’s rapid downgrade from a Category 4 to a Category 1 underscores a potential public safety issue with the way hurricanes are measured and discussed. Hurricanes are categorized using what’s called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which takes only a single measurement into account: the speed of a hurricane’s sustained winds. A hurricane is considered Category 1 if it has sustained wind speeds of 74 miles per hour (mph) to 95 mph, Category 2 with speeds between 96 mph and 110 mph, and so on. But hurricanes like Florence bring dangers beyond high winds, most notably storm surge and flash flooding. “Florence is an excellent example of a storm that is a lower category than it...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime weather Source Type: news