What Storms Get Measured With A Scale?
The most notable storms to receive scales are tornadoes and hurricanes. For tornadoes, it started with the Fujita Scale, later evolving into the Advanced Fujita Scale. For hurricanes, it is the Saffir-Simpson Scale. Like many scientific scales, these are named after their creators. Each of these scales is intended to create a way to measure the storm and then quickly and efficiently communicate this estimation to the scientific and meteorological fields, and to the general public. These scales are used to measure the strength and danger level of the storm, generally using wind speed as a way to measure it, with faster winds leading to higher rankings, and due to more potential for destruction. However, despite the fact that blizzards have a lot in common with these storms, there is no such scale for blizzards, and since both these skills have existed since the 70’s, there has been plenty of time for someone to devise a scale, leaving us to wonder why nobody has.
What Would Potential Ideas Look Like For Measuring Blizzards, And Why Won’t They Work?
There are a few reasons why measuring a blizzard is less straightforward than the other storms mentioned.
The first, and most straightforward way one might propose to measure the strength of a blizzard is, similarly to tornadoes and hurricanes, simply to measure their wind speed, ranking them from 0-5. With the absence of a creator to name them after, we can call these categorisations B0, B1, B2, B3, B4 and B5, with B0 being the weakest, and B5 being the strongest, and rarest. This seems to make sense, making it consistent with the other two, but there are other factors. For example, the amount of snow is a huge factor in potentially measuring a blizzard, but this scale doesn’t measure that. Two blizzards with the same speed, but vastly different amounts of snow, are very different storms.
You might want to counter this by having a system that shows both wind speed and amount of snow, each measured from 0-5, measuring wind with the letter W, and snow with the letter S. For example, W2 S4 might indicate a blizzard with a moderate amount of wind, and a severe amount of snow. However, this information might lead to some confusion, as there would be two numbers instead of one. Also, since the first number is often seen as more prominent or important, a W3 S1 blizzard might be seen as more powerful than the W2 S4 one mentioned earlier. When you add in the idea that items such as how cold it is (a blizzard where it’s -40 C (-40 F) is much more dangerous than one that is -5 C (23 F), you’re stuck either making a third number, or dismissing this as part of the scale.
You might also be tempted to measure visibility. For the sake of an example, we’ll go back to using B to measure, with B0 meaning high visibility and B5 meaning low visibility. However, this means that a blizzard where visibility is low due to massive amounts of wind, and one with low visibility due to high amounts of snow, might have the same rating, despite being very different.
Simply put, blizzards, despite seeming similar to tornadoes and hurricanes, in that they are storms with high winds, are vastly different and have many factors that the other two do not have.
