PHOTO: NOAA
Though the calendar may only read February, scientists have been carefully considering the upcoming hurricane season for some time. As a result, last week NOAA’s National Weather Service announced it will use a new hurricane scale. While the changes won’t have much, if any, impact on megayacht cruising plans, they are important to understand.
The previous scale, called the Saffir-Simpson Scale, included wind-speed ranges, plus specific measurements for storm surge and flooding effects. The new scale focuses instead on wind impacts alone, modified in part based on public comment that NOAA solicited last year. The new name: Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The five categories of wind-speed ranges from the prior scale remain the same in this one.
NOAA will, of course, continue to monitor potential storm surges and the related floods. It will also continue to release these forecasts when it issues hurricane advisories. But after studying recent hurricanes and consulting leading scientific experts, along with the collected public input, it realized the Saffir-Simpson Scale’s predicted storm surges didn’t always come into play. Indeed, a number of variables affect them, such as the hurricane’s intensity, barometric pressure, size, and movement. Other variables: how deep the near-shore waters are, and what the local landscape is like.
Hurricane Charley and Hurricane Ike present good compare-contrast examples. Hurricane Charley was a Category 4 hurricane when it hit the Gulf Coast of Florida nearly six years ago, but the storm surge was only six to seven feet at its highest level. Meanwhile, Hurricane Ike (pictured above), which hit Texas in 2008, was a Category 2, with a whopping 15- to 20-foot peak storm surge. Yet another example was Hurricane Katrina, which had a peak surge of 25 feet in Mississippi, akin to a far stronger storm despite being a Category 3.
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