Saffir-Simpson Scale is a useful index in a sense that it can help people, researcher, emergency managers, and policy makers to understand the severity of the hurricane wind and prepare accordingly. Based on the scale, one can perceive the strength of the wind and its associated damage in the infrastructure. But this has a couple of problems associated with it. Firstly, the scale is totally dependent in the wind speed and does not include other characteristics of hurricanes such as flood range, storm surge, and rainfall. Also, it does not tell about the size of the wind field. A lower category hurricane with larger wind field could have significant damage. In addition, it is not quite useful about the impacts on rural vs urban area, and developing vs developed nations as the quality of buildings are hugely differed accordingly. In summary, it can be used but need to communicate the meaning of the category to the people so that they can well understand and not confused and panic during the event.
No comments:
Post a Comment