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My Jim Bohannon Radio Show Appearance & Discovering the Hurricane Severity Index

On Friday evening I was a guest on The Jim Bohannon Show to discuss my blog post Will Hurricane Sandy (1-175-485) Again Demonstrate Need to Enhance Saffir-Simpson Scale? It was such a pleasure to be on his show, he’s a true professional. You can find a link to the archived recording here.

During the interview he mentioned Hurricane Carla and the news coverage of the event. My friends at Mediabistro have a video which captures the historic nature of the news coverage of the event:

Interestingly, part of that story was the size of storm. On the Hurricane Carla Wikipedia page, I saw reference to something called the Hurricane Severity Index. I had never seen or heard of it before. Chris Herbert and Bill Weinzapfel, meteorologists at Impactweather developed this scale, explained in this link, which explains their scale.

It is fascinating to me that while different in implementation, the core ideas of our belief are almost identical – hurricane size is equally important as Saffir-Simpson scale intensity. It appears that ImpactWeather provides this privately to corporations who pay for their advice. It appears to be a situation where the private sector provided a solution that is superior to the government solution and the question that remains now is when will the National Hurricane Center adopt either my idea or license ImpactWeather’s solution.

I’m going to contact ImpactWeather as there are many correlations between my current work on improving business operations and their clients, perhaps there are some synergies to explore.

It’s amazing the breakthroughs that occur when different generations communicate with each other!

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