Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale

A five-category scale classifying hurricanes by sustained one-minute wind speed, from Category 1 (74 to 95 miles per hour) to Category 5 (157 miles per hour and above). Herbert Saffir, a civil engineer, and Robert Simpson, then director of the United States National Hurricane Center, developed it in 1971 while Saffir was completing a United Nations study of hurricane-resistant housing; it reached the public in 1973. Rating wind alone, the scale does not capture a storm's physical size, its rainfall or its storm surge, so meteorologists including Kerry Emanuel have argued that a lower-category storm reaching a populated coastline, or a large slow-moving one, can cause more damage and more deaths than a smaller, more compact storm rated higher.