Wind speed is the primary judge for classifying a typhoon’s strength, but that classification doesn’t account for a storm’s greatest threat to humans, Marshall Shepherd, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Atmospheric Sciences, told Wired. “It worries me that we focus on scale and category when what we know from hurricanes and tropical cyclones in general we see most of deaths from water,” said Shepherd, who is director of UGA’s atmospheric sciences program. “No scale has a way to capture the water threat.”
