A structural engineer, Saffir was interested in the effect of high winds on structures. As a county engineer in Florida, he helped rewrite building codes to help homes and other buildings withstand hurricane winds.
He realized that the existing system to classify hurricanes (simply “major” or “minor”) was woefully inadequate, so in 1969 he created a five-category system which helped to predict what sort of damage could be expected from approaching storms. Robert Simpson, then the director of the National Hurricane Center, adopted the scale, and expanded it to add information on damage done by storm surges. The result is the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, which is still used today.
“We needed that type of thing desperately at the time,” said Simpson, now 95. “I couldn’t tell the Salvation Army, for example, how much and what materials they should be shipping. The scale gave them a much better handle on that.” Saffir continued his work in the field at least through Hurricane Katrina — at Category 5, the most intense storm: he traveled to the affected area to report on structural damage there. He died November 21 of complications from surgery. He was 90.