Hurricanes are escalated tropical cyclones, with windspeeds above 74 miles per hous. They are known for their potential to create vast areas of destruction and loss of life due to their intense wind and rain. These storms are classified using their intensity and strength.
Tropical depressions are cyclones with a maximum sustained wind speed below 38 miles per hour (mph), as shown in the table below.
Tropical storms are the next escalation beyond a Tropical Depression. This label describes storms with windspeeds ranging from 39 to 73 mph, as shown in the table below.
Our tool uses the categories defined by the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which assigns a cyclone a category from 1 to 5. This scale uses a hurricane's maximum sustained wind speed to define its categories as shown in the image above. This 5 category scale is used to estimate the potential damage associated with storms of each category, with storms classified as Category 3 or higher considered major hurricanes.
Storm surge is an event caused by storms in which the water level
of the sea rises in coastal locations. This can cause extreme flooding,
resulting in destruction and the loss of life. Storm surge is a
particularly devastating and destructive phenomenon, and it is
regarded as the deadliest part of a tropical storm or hurricane event
(NOAA, 2011). Storm surge is impacted by several factors during a
storm event, including the shape and other characteristics of a coastline,
as wells as a storm’s intensity, forward speed, and size.
The table above shows the amount of storm surge associated with each Saffir-Simpson
Hurricane category. It should be noted that the Saffir-Simpson scale does not
take storm surge into account in its categorization of storms, but due to its
deadly and destructive nature, it is important to understand the risk of storm
surge associated with each category of hurricane.
As climate change continues to become a more relevant topic in our day-to-day lives, public access to climate information is becoming increasingly important information. While warming oceans due to climate change have not caused an increase in the number of hurricanes that occur, they have created the capacity for new hurricanes to be more intense.
These more intense hurricanes can cause more damage and have longer lasting impacts than previous storms, with more storms causing more than $1 billion dollars in damage than in the past (Hurt & Waldholz, 2024).
Understanding trends from hurricanes of the past can help to create strategies to handle the increasingly devastating hurricanes we are currently experiencing, especially in places like the southeastern United States, which are already susceptible to hurricanes. The Gulf of Mexico in particular has been affected by the warming of ocean temperatures that has been attributed to climate change (Hurt & Waldholz, 2024).