Herbert Saffir devised the five categories of hurricane strength, and so helped to save countless lives by enabling forecasters to express the threat level of approaching storms in an organised and meaningful manner.

Saffir was an engineer and expert on wind damage. In 1969 he was involved in a UN project to help to reduce hurricane damage to low-cost buildings around the world. Scales for rating damage from earthquakes were well known at that time, so to help officials to understand the full range of hurricane damage, Saffir proposed rating storms from 1 to 5, based on wind speeds above 75 miles per hour.

Category 1, with winds of up to 95mph, involves litle structural damage, with branches blown off trees and mobile homes flipped over. At the most extreme, Category 5, damage is catastrophic as winds of more than 155mph smash down trees, tear the roofs off houses or completely destroy buildings.

The Saffir scale was extended later by Robert Simpson, at the National Hurricane Centre, Florida, to include flood damage, especially storm surges created by hurricanes, after which it became known as the Saffir-Simpson scale. It has since become the definitive way to describe storm strength in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific. Before the scale, hurricanes were simply described as major or minor.

Saffir was born in New York in 1917. He left Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in civil engineering in 1940 and served in the Army during the war, after which he moved to South Florida as a county engineer. Within three months he experienced two hurricanes, and although there was some warning of them, he had no idea how severe the storms would be or what kind of damage they would inflict. But that experience inspired his lifelong interest in studying hurricanes and finding ways of lessening their impacts.

Before the advent of satellites the only way weather forecasters could track hurricanes was through radio reports from ships about conditions at sea. In 1960 the first weather satellite, Tiros I, was launched and only ten days later it spotted its first cyclone in the South Pacific, north of New Zealand. Saffir realised that if satellite pictures were beamed back fast enough, they might give enough information about a storm to estimate its strength, which would give sufficient warning to prepare for the storm or evacuate the area if necessary.

Apart from his work on the hurricane scale and storm warnings, Saffir wrote building codes in South Florida to strengthen buildings against wind damage. He surveyed the damage after hurricanes and worked out how buildings were damaged and then found ways of strengthening them. For instance, wooden-framed buildings often collapse after the wind blows the roof off, which can be prevented by strengthening the joints used for tying down the roof. Saffir's recommendations were used to improve building codes in tropical storm regions from the Caribbean to Australia.

But his biggest problem was battling against complacency from local authorities and builders. Building codes were often ignored because of the extra costs involved, although in many cases the additional work was relatively inexpensive. Even in his last years, Saffir remained a passionate advocate of good building design to resist storms. On surveying the devastation along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from Hurricane Katrina in 2005 he was dismayed at the unnecessary wind-blown devastation, quite apart from the well-publicised flood damage caused by storm surges. Poor building standards, inspection and enforcement of codes were to blame for much of the damage and casualties.

His wife, Sarah, died before him and he is survived by his son and daughter.

Herbert Saffir, engineer, was born on March 29, 1917. He died on November 21, 2007, aged 90