Posted 11/30/2008 12:59:00 PM by Douglas

The hand wringing from Ike (as well as re-roofing) is far from over. Turns out the weather prognosticators have figured out (shocker!) that the Saffir-Simpson scale really didn't tell us squat this time around. Remember, it was only a 2!

As hurricane season ends today, the debate over whether to substantially change how Americans are warned about tropical weather is just beginning.

Hurricane Ike — the most destructive storm in the 2008 hurricane season — was not classified as a major hurricane by the yardstick forecasters have used for decades.

Yet Ike produced a catastrophic storm surge and ranks as the third-costliest tropical system to strike the United States in 150 years, behind only Hurricanes Katrina and Andrew.

This disconnect has driven forecasters to consider modifying the venerable Saffir-Simpson scale, under which Ike ranked as a mere Category 2 hurricane.

Well, duh. There's several proposals to update the scale based on energy.

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.

OK, so what's the hold-up? Oh right, it's next to impossible to predict storm energy and its path in any meaningful way:

But evacuation managers live in the real, maddening world in which nature still cannot be forecast with enough precision to really matter.

So sleep tight knowing those tasked to predict such things know just as much as you do when it's time to leave. And remember, you're an idiot.