( NYPost )
Hurricane Milton is threatening to reach known maximum limits with wind gusts already topping 200 miles per hour — leading to calls for a new Category 6 designation for such a historic superstorm.
“This is nothing short of astronomical,” Florida meteorologist Noah Bergren said late Monday as Milton reached sustained winds of 180 mph and “gusts 200+ mph.”
“I am at a loss for words to meteorologically describe to you the storm’s small eye and intensity,” he marveled.
“This hurricane is nearing the mathematical limit of what Earth’s atmosphere over this ocean water can produce.”
After being a monster Category 5 storm for much of Monday, Milton was downgraded early Tuesday to a Category 4 with maximum sustained winds of 155 mph — just two mph below a Category 5 — but is expected to increase again as it churns towards Florida’s gulf coast, where it is expected to have a devastating impact.
After forming in the Gulf of Mexico, Milton rapidly accelerated from a tropical storm with 60-mph winds Sunday morning to a deadly, 180-mph, Category 5 hurricane by Monday — an incredible trebling of power in only 36 hours.
If the hurricane reaches winds of 192 mph, it will surpass a rare threshold that just five storms have reached since 1980, USA Today reported.
Its exceptional intensity has prompted calls from some meteorologists to expand the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale to include a new sixth category for hurricanes.
While no such official category exists, professor Michael E. Mann tweeted that “Milton might have actually breached the 192 mph ‘cat 6′ cutoff.”
Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jim Kossin, a retired federal scientist and science adviser at the nonprofit First Street Foundation, co-authored a study published earlier this year exploring whether there should be a new category for hurricanes.
“We find that a number of recent storms have already achieved this hypothetical Category 6 intensity, and based on multiple independent lines of evidence examining the highest simulated and potential peak wind speeds, more such storms are projected as the climate continues to warm,” they wrote.
However, Fox Weather meteorologist Mike Rawlins told The Post Tuesday that a new category is “unnecessary” and the Saffir-Simpson scale remains the gold standard for measuring hurricanes.
“There are movements out in the meteorological realm calling for the scale to be retired and for a new method of measuring a storm’s intensity to be created since the storm surge and flash flooding often do more damage than the wind alone. But I am not aware of any work happening on that at this time,” he said.
The late Robert Simpson, co-creator of the Saffir-Simpson Wind Scale, said in 1999 that creating a sixth category would be “immaterial” due to the extreme damage to buildings already caused by Category 5 storms.
Milton is already the fourth-strongest hurricane on record by barometric pressure — a measure of storm intensity — with central barometric pressure at 897 millibars
Only five hurricanes have dipped below 900 in official records dating back more than 170 years, according to the Miami Herald.
Milton weakened ever so slightly to a pressure 924 mb on Tuesday morning.
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