It is estimated that each level causes about 10 times as much damage as the one previous. This means that a Cat 5 is 10,000 times as damaging as a Cat 1.
Str: Is this the measurments?
Not an expert, but I think the previous poster mixed up his earthquake and hurricane scales.
In terms of wind, the power of a hurricane is (IIRC) a function of wind speed squared. Transition from a 120 mph to a 160 mph storm would be a factor of about 1.8 times more powerful.
It doesn't really matter....in a CAT 5, nothing survives unscathed.
RS: I think it's immaterial. Because when you get up into winds in excess of 155 miles per hour you have enough damage if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it's going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it's engineered. It may only blow the windows out, but on the other hand, it can actually rupture the stairwells, the elevator wells and twist them, and it's happened in many buildings so that you can't even use the elevators after they've experienced this. So I think that it's immaterial what will happen with winds stronger than 156 miles per hour. That's the reason why we didn't try to go any higher than that anyway.
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That's why there ain't no CAT 6...cause at 155 mph, it really doesn't matter anymore.....
http://www.novalynx.com/simpson-interview.html
The power exerted by wind is proportional to the cube of its velocity.