Gustav (2008) not Cat 5? Plz reply!

[zaia]

Question...How come Hurricane Gustav isn't listed as a Category 5 storm?
I distinctly remember watching MSNBC back in 2008 and they interrupted their programming to report breaking news that Hurricane Gustav had attained Category 5 status.

Why does wikipedia list Gustav as a Cat 4? I'm confused

[HurrikaneBryce]

Gustav had max winds at 155 mph. A category 5 has winds speeds of 156 +. I guess MSNBC was given wrong information.

[zaia]

So you mean Hurricane Gustav was never a Category 5 storm??

[HurrikaneBryce]

Exactly.

[zaia]

Thanks for the quick reply, because I was a bit confused. I didn't realize that Gustav never became a Cat 5.

I remember going to google news and searching hurricane gustav right after I heard MSNBC report it as a Cat 5 heading right towards LA. All the news articles were claiming that the NHC was getting ready to upgrade Gustav to cat 5. So I thought it was a Cat 5 storm at its strongest.

[Florida1118]

Gustav had max winds at 155 mph. A category 5 has winds speeds of 156 +. I guess MSNBC was given wrong information.

Max winds were only 150mph...

[ColinDelia]

There were multiple stories at the time with headlines such as "gustav growing toward category 5", " gustav almost category 5", " forecasters say gustav could become a category 5". You can still search for "gustav category 5" and read these stories as they were

[abajan]

Gustav had max winds at 155 mph. A category 5 has winds speeds of 156 +. I guess MSNBC was given wrong information.

Max winds were only 150mph...

Actually, this link shows that the maximum sustained winds never got any higher than 125 knots (approximately 145 mph).

[HURAKAN]

NHC - http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/TCR-AL072008_Gustav.pdf

"Gustav reached a peak intensity of 135 kt as it made landfall in the Pinar del Rio province of western Cuba near 2200 UTC 30 August."

If you want accuracy, go to the source! 155 mph was the peak intensity, adjusted post-season.

[Chacor]

It's also a known flaw in several advisory-parsing track software, including on Weather Underground and on storm2k's map itself, that puts a 135 knot (Cat 4) storm down as a Cat 5 because it's on the border.

[CrazyC83]

It was adjusted more than a year after the storm, the initial TCR release went with the Recon-confirmed 130 kt thinking the land data was not representative, but further investigation proved otherwise. A case could be made that it was a Cat 5 if that land report was not the maximum winds, but that seems awfully high for the pressure of 941mb.