The Brief
- The hurricane severity scale used today only measures wind, not storm surge or rainfall.
- USF professor Jennifer Collins helped develop a new system called the Tropical Cyclone Severity Scale.
- Researchers hope it will give the public more insight to better prepare.
Tampa – For decades, the Saffir-Simpson scale has rated hurricanes solely by wind strength, from Category 1 to 5. But researchers say that leaves out the deadliest threats: storm surge and flooding.
A University of South Florida Geosciences professor, Jennifer Collins, worked with a team from a university in The Netherlands to design a new system called the Tropical Cyclone Severity Scale. Unlike the current system, it incorporates three factors: wind, storm surge, and rainfall.
Why It Matters:
Collins points to Hurricane Florence in 2018. While it made landfall as a Category 1 storm, its catastrophic flooding and surge caused devastation well beyond what people expected. Collins said, “With our scale, it would have been four for surge and five for rainfall. So we would have given it a Cat 5. If people had heard a Category 5, people who evacuated wouldn’t have turned around to come home, they would have stayed away.”…