December 02, 2008
More ways to measure hurricanes

Sounds reasonable to me.


Hurricane scientists meeting in Miami this week will discuss, and perhaps act on, a proposal to develop a new scale for classifying hurricanes that better accounts for storm surge.

"It is not an easy issue, but I believe a change must be made," said Gene Hafele, meteorologist-in-charge of the Houston/Galveston office of the National Weather Service who is proposing the modification.

"Bad decisions were made during Ike by both citizens and officials, based on the notion that Ike was a Category 2 storm and a feeling that 'I have been through a lot worse.' It is hard to convince people that they could face certain death when they see that a storm is not even considered to be a major hurricane."

The Saffir-Simpson scale -- developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by civil engineer Herbert Saffir and Robert Simpson, then-director of the National Hurricane Center -- is simple and has gained wide public acceptance.

Based upon maximum sustained winds, the scale ranges from Category 1, the weakest hurricane classification, to the fearsome Category 5 with winds greater than 155 mph.

The problem, proponents of a change say, is that the scale fails to predict storm surge accurately, the most devastating component of a hurricane for coastal areas.

Storm surge is determined more by the size of a hurricane than its maximum winds.

Bigger storms have more energy, slosh around more ocean and produce much larger surges.


I don't know why you wouldn't want to add a dimension to hurricane metrics. It was obvious as Ike was approaching the coast that calling it a Category 2 storm was understating its destructiveness by a lot. More data is good, and giving local officials the tools to make better-informed decisions about evacuations sounds like a no-brainer to me. Muse has more.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on December 02, 2008 to Hurricane Katrina
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