What hurricane categories mean and why we use them

Before Harvey, or Irma, or Katrina, there was Camille. With winds so powerful that they knocked out wind gauges in Mississippi, the epic strength of Hurricane Camille was monstrous. But before it struck the Gulf coast on August 17, 1969, Robert Simpson, the director of the National Hurricane Center, made the executive decision to warn residents in the path of the giant storm of high winds, low barometric pressure and a storm surge of between 15 and 20 feet.

According to a USA Today report about the event many years later, the decision to get so specific was unprecedented. In doing so, Simpson bucked tradition at the National Weather Service’s precursor, the United States Weather Bureau, which typically gave people living in the path of a hurricane generic warnings instead of granular details of storm surge or wind speed.

The decision to give people more information paid off. More people got out of the way of the storm, and Simpson was on the lookout for ways to communicate the dangers of storms more clearly. Around the same time, an engineer named Herbert Saffir was trying to figure out a way to quantify hurricane damage for the United Nations, and found that wind damage above 75 miles per hour wasn’t well categorized.

Saffir came up with a scale of structural damage due to destructive hurricane winds for his work at the UN, which Simpson found as he was pondering better communication options in the aftermath of Camille. Simpson was looking for a better way to communicate how dangerous hurricanes were to first responders, relief organizations, and the public.

Read More at:
https://www.popsci.com/what-hurricane-categories-mean

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