This Visual Shows the Increasing Strength Between Each Hurricane Category.
Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast on August 25 as aCategory 4 hurricane .
Irma hit the northern Lesser Antilles earlier this week as a Category 5 hurricane and continues to move west and north, raising serious concerns in the Caribbean and South Florida.
While we’ve already talked about what these different types of categories actually mean, it can be hard to imagine the real difference between, say, Category 3 and Category 5, when these are just ominous terms that often appear on the nightly news. …
To help with this terrifying mental exercise, here is a hurricane-scale animation of various strengths developed by AtmosNews of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), as shared by science writer Brian. Kahn :
For better or worse, the visuals somehow make the distinction between “devastating damage” (Category 3) and “catastrophic damage” resulting in “uninhabitable” territory (Category 4) somehow seems more concrete.