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Could Michael Get Reclassified As A Stronger Hurricane? It Wouldn’t Be The First

Getty images via Miami Herald
A man walks through a beachfront neighborhood six days after Hurricane Michael made landfall near Mexico Beach, Florida, on Oct. 10 as a Category 4 storm. The neighborhood, with homes lining the beach, is now mostly flattened.

In the hyper data world of hurricane forecasting, where history is written in millibars and miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center’s 168-year record of Atlantic storms stands as an invaluable index to meteorologists, the insurance industry, government planning departments and, of course, weather geeks.

What’s less known: It gets tweaked a lot.

Since 2008, hurricane researchers have added new storms to the record almost every year, uncovering more information in old ship and weather records that more often than not depict mightier storms. As recently as 2011, they discovered two new hurricanes. Altogether, they’ve identified 82 overlooked tropical storms and three hurricanes swirling in the Atlantic since they began revising old records in the mid-1990s. Dozens more hurricanes have been reclassified to higher and lower categories.

Read more at our news partner, the Miami Herald

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