Hurricane Erin raced from a Category 1 to a Category 5 storm. If Erin keeps ramping up, is there a Category 6?

Erin's sustained winds dropped to 110 mph overnight, making the storm a strong Category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson ...

The longstanding hurricane rating system, the Saffir-Simpson Scale, only takes into account sustained wind speeds and not the ...

Erin, once a Category 5 hurricane over the weekend that more than doubled wind speed to nearly 160 mph, on Monday morning ...

If a storm is a Category 3, 4 or 5, it is deemed a "major" hurricane due to the potential for "significant loss of life and ...

The growing inadequacy of an open-ended Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale in a warming world Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America Published: ...

Let's break it down. Big Picture -What It Measures: As the name implies, the current version is strictly a wind scale that rates a hurricane's sustained winds (not gusts) from Category 1 through 5.

Following a hurricane at a CATEGORY 4, most of an area will be “uninhabitable” for anywhere between weeks or months. CATEGORY 5: This is the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

"The Saffir-Simpson scale is a measure of wind speed. But far more people die from hurricane flooding than from strong winds. Hurricane Florence made landfall near Wilmington as a Category 1 storm.

Herbert Saffir and Dr. Robert Simpson developed a 5 point scale for categorizing Hurricane strength. The scale is as follows. Category:1 — 74-95 mph, No real damage to buildings.