Damage Assessment Body of Knowledge

Forensic Engineering

What is Forensic Engineering

(Instructions to navigate to journal article)

Forensic engineering is the investigation of structures, in our case, residential structures or components that fail. Our goal would be to retrace the processes and procedures that lead to failure in order to develop structural systems that are appropriate for both hurricanes and tornadoes throughout the state of Florida.

EF Rating

What is the Enhanced Fujita Scale?

The Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale, first introduced by Dr. T. Theodore Fujita as the Fujita scale, helps to categorize tornadoes by their intensities and areas of damage, and estimate wind speeds associated with the damage caused by the tornado. The EF scale ranges from EF0 with winds between 65-85 mph to EF5 with winds between 200-234 mph.

Enhanced Fujita Rating Training
Online EF-Scale training conducted by the Warning Dicision Training Branch (WDTB) of the National Weather Service

Damage Assessment Toolkit Viewer

View datapoints from storm surveys conducted by NWS using the Damage Assessment Toolkit Viewer.

On the site, you can use the Identify Toolbox (pencil icon) to view datapoints. You can also extract KML or shapefiles of data using the Extract Toolbox (icon to the right of the pencil icon).

Click here for damage assessment toolkit documentation.