Could Hurricane Irma Become a Category 6 Devastation Machine?

Several viral news stories are surfacing saying that the meteorologists will be creating a new [...]

Several viral news stories are surfacing saying that the meteorologists will be creating a new category designation for Hurricane Irma. However, those reports are simply not true.

Reports of Irma being classified as an unprecedented "category 6" hurricane began circulating after a blog post speculating the change was imminent was written by Mike Snyder, according to Snopes. Snyder isn't a scientist — he's a Republican state congressional candidate who runs a blog.

Other click-bait sites ran with it from there, with little clarification of the actual scale for hurricane categories.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale is used to measure the "category" of hurricane. Category 5, the current designation of Irma, covers all hurricanes over 157 mph. Irma has had a maximum wind speed of 185 mph.

That speed makes Irma a remarkably powerful hurricane, but there's no plan of adjusting the scale just because of its existence.

Snyder's original article connected the high-speed winds with several past quotes from a 2015 academic paper entitled Nature Climate Change. The paper discusses the proposition of altering the current way hurricanes are measured to adjust for the increased high-speed storms caused by climate change.

Snyder doesn't make it clear that the paper isn't connected with Irma in any way. That's how the online confusion began.

Follow along with the live updates concerning Hurricane Irma here.

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