Key Points
It ultimately arrived at the coast on Wednesday as a Category 3 storm, with winds of 125 mph...
That Milton could decrease in category but still threaten such a high storm surge and volume of rainfall shows a major shortcoming of the SaffirSimpson scale, by which we assign hurricanes categories 1 through 5: Its based solely on wind speed, even though in an era of climate change, hurricanes have been unleashing more and more water on cities..
Hurricanes like Katrina showed the potential for confusion: The gigantic storm surge of up to 28 feet far exceeded the 12 feet predicted based on its Category 3 wind speed, corresponding instead to what would be expected from a Category 5..
The index measures wind speed on a 25-point scale and a storms sizethat is, how far these high winds extendon another, to give a total rating out of 50, and compares that to historic hurricanes..
For its part, the National Hurricane Center started issuing storm surge watches and warnings in addition to categorizing hurricanes based on windspeed..
