Record-breaking Hurricane Melissa has renewed calls to amend the scale used to classify the strength of a hurricane and estimate the potential damage it could inflict when it makes landfall. Some scientists say the over-50-year-old Saffir-Simpson scale might not adequately convey the danger of high-end storms.
The scale was developed in 1971 by wind engineer Herb Saffir and meteorologist Bob Simpson. It was designed to be a tool to help warn the public of the potential impacts of hurricanes. Powerful Category 5 Hurricane Melissa pushed the top end of the scale with peak maximum sustained winds at one point reaching 185 mph, well above the threshold of 157 mph needed to qualify as the highest category of the Saffir-Simpson scale.
Melissa has sparked discussion about whether the current scale, which assigns categories to hurricanes from 1 to 5 based entirely on peak sustained wind speeds, should be revised to also take into account the torrential rain and deadly storm surges hurricanes can produce.
"It's impossible to boil the threats of a hurricane down to one number," Brian McNoldy, a hurricane researcher at the University of Miami, told Scientific American last year as the 2024 Atlantic Hurricane season began.
In a study published in early 2024, hurricane experts noted that our overheating planet is leading to more intense tropical cyclones and called for the addition of a sixth category to the Saffir-Simpson scale.
"Three separate lines of evidence from both observations and models suggest that the open-endedness of the fifth category of the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale becomes increasingly problematic for conveying wind risk in a warming world," concluded the authors of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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As awe-inspiring as Melissa was, it would not have qualified as a proposed Category 6 hurricane that would require 192 mph maximum sustained winds, but its power and the damage it wrought were a reminder to many meteorologists that we need to revisit the current hurricane scale.
The 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season has earned its place in the record books. Melissa rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane in about 18 hours. It was the strongest hurricane to ever make landfall in Jamaica and tied for the highest sustained wind speed at landfall for any tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin.
Melissa's 185 mph winds tied it with other notorious hurricanes like the Labor Day hurricane of 1935, Gilbert in 1988, and Dorian in 2019. All five of the storms to reach the terrifying benchmark of a proposed Category 6 hurricane have occurred since 2010. Four of the five storms were typhoons in the western Pacific, with the remaining storm a hurricane that formed in the eastern Pacific.
The death toll from Melissa climbed to at least 30 by early Thursday. Officials in hard-hit Jamaica say they expect more casualties. Melissa had weakened to a Category 2 with maximum sustained winds of 105 mph by Thursday afternoon. It was located 430 miles west, southwest of Bermuda, moving to the northeast at 30 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center.
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