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

With hurricane season officially underway, we explore whether or not the Saffir-Simpson scale is the best way to rate a hurricane's strength.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale was developed in 1971 and unveiled to the public in 1973.

At that point, the NHC uses the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale of intensity to categorize it on a scale of 1-5.

Hurricane Ian made landfall Wednesday as a Category 4 hurricane, the second-most dangerous rating on the Saffir-Simpson intensity scale. (Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun Sentinel/TNS) ...

The Saffir-Simpson Scale rates hurricanes on winds. The new proposed scale being devloped by Jennifer Collins. professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida includes ...

The Saffir-Simpson Scale doesn’t capture that right now, and that is a much bigger discussion that we absolutely need to be funding and to be doing more work on, and we need to be basing it on ...

Within the span of two weeks, two hurricanes, Helene and Milton, rocked the Southeastern United States. Both storms were categorized as major hurricanes - that’s a Category 3 or higher. And those ...

Due to the number of hurricanes that have undergone rapid intensification, some researchers have discussed adding a Category 6 to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale already captures ‘Catastrophic Damage’ from wind, so it’s not clear that there would be a need for another category even if storms were to get stronger.

While some people theorized Hurricane Milton might reach Category 6, no such rating exists. The hurricane Saffir-Simpson scale only goes up to Category 5.