Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook.

Andrew was bad enough as it is: over 25 billion in damage, some 40 people killed, and countless lives turned upside down. But Andrew was only rated a Category 4, one notch down from the bad-boy rating of Cat 5. Only two Cat 5's have made landfall in the US this century: the catastrophic Labor Day hurricane of 1935, which hit the Florida Keys, and Hurricane Camille, which raked the Gulf Coast in 1969. The highest winds clocked in Andrew fell short of the Cat 5 threshold of 156 miles an hour. However, many instruments were knocked out at the height of the storm. Some researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been taking a second look at Andrew. It's part of a bigger study to reexamine all the Atlantic hurricanes of the last 150 years. Since World War II, aircraft reconnaissance flights have measured the wind thousands of feet high inside hurricanes. When these readings are used to estimate surface winds, they're brought down a little bit, since friction takes a bite out of the wind. But some new research shows that the wind speed doesn't drop off quite as much as we thought. The bottom line is that official ratings may have underestimated the biggest hurricanes in recent years. If Andrew does get certified as a Cat 5, it won't erase any damage, but it might satisfy some folks who endured the storm and knew they were living through hurricane history.

Thanks today to writer, Bob Henson of Boulder Colorado. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is generously supported by Subaru of America and The National Science Foundation.

Today's Links

Pictures of Andrew
http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/rsd/images/andrew.html