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Live Science reports:
Hurricane Patricia is currently churning in the eastern Pacific Ocean, and weather forecasters are calling it the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Communities in southern Mexico, where the hurricane is expected to make landfall later today (Oct. 23), are already preparing for a "potentially catastrophic" storm.
[...] Hurricane Patricia is a Category 5 storm--the highest on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale that is used to gauge a storm's intensity--and is expected to have winds of nearly 200 miles per hour (325 km/h) with even higher gusts, according to the National Hurricane Center (NHC).
[...] Category 5 storms typically have winds of at least 157 mph (252 km/h), but Patricia is special; earlier today, the NHC said Hurricane Patricia is the strongest hurricane on record in the area the center monitors, which includes the Atlantic. (Before Patricia, the strongest hurricane measured in the Western Hemisphere was Wilma in 2005, with top wind speeds of 175 mph, or 282 km/h.)
In the coverage by NPR (formerly National Public Radio), meteorologist Ryan Maue, PhD notes:
as a Category 5 storm, Patricia is at the top of the Saffir-Simpson scale. If the categories went higher (as some have suggested in recent years), it would actually be labeled Category 7.
takyon: National Hurricane Center
(Score: 3, Insightful) by TrumpetPower! on Saturday October 24 2015, @02:47PM
Not true.
"Get the heck out of dodge" reasonably means going to the local storm shelter for the duration -- especially in urban areas where mass evacuation isn't practical. Especially especially in a case such as Patricia where the storm goes from a mere tropical depression to the most powerful storm on record in the span of a single day.
But a storm shelter designed to withstand the 160 MPH of a Category 5 hurricane might not fare so well against 200 MPH winds. You're now talking about a storm that's effectively a Category 5 tornado, and one literally the size of a major metropolis.
Or, in other words, it's the difference between a Katrina-style regional disaster...and the actual manifestation of a movie from The Asylum [theasylum.cc].
A new category for something like that isn't at all unreasonable.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday October 26 2015, @05:14PM
A storm shelter designed to withstand 160MPH winds is still better than a house that definitely won't survive. Creating new levels of severity could be helpful scientifically speaking, but I don't think it would do anything to help the average person understand the different levels. I was talking with a friend and learned that Hurricanes tend to produce Tornados. I did a bit of googling and found this article about it http://www.livescience.com/37235-how-hurricanes-spawn-tornadoes.html/ [livescience.com]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"