The Saffir-Simpson scale assigns a storm a number between 1 and 5, with "1" being a weak hurricane and "5" the strongest.
"Staff worked through the night to tackle the problem but unfortunately the sheer scale of the storm caused localised flooding in low lying parts of central Dundee, " he said.
The Outer Banks of North Carolina saw such gains several decades ago after rebuilding from a storm of similar scale.
The two storm measurement systems are similar in scale to the ones that measure hurricanes and tornadoes.
They're using data collected by the weather service during the storm, to try to understand the surge, try to understand the wave heights, and they're going to create a computer model, as opposed to the scale model of a city, for the storm as it came up from the south and the Gulf of Mexico, and see if they can recreate the exact conditions.
While no-one really knows whether this storm will create chaos or full-scale national catastrophe, the political effects are already being felt.
The previous highest destructive potential for storm surge was 5.6 on a scale of 0 to 6, set during Hurricane Isabel of 2003.
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Banbury said the UN knew well in advance that the storm would hit Myanmar, but no one predicted the scale of the disaster.
On the older and more nationally oriented Northeast Snow Impact Scale, which looks at snow in the entire history of a storm, the weekend storm's total score was 4.35, ranking it 25th.
However, the destructive potential of the storm surge was record high: 5.8 on a scale of 0 to 6.
FORBES: Hurricane Sandy's Storm Surge: A Preview of Things to Come
They rank the weekend storm as a 3 and "major" on a 1 to 5 scale.
Two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration storm-rating measurements initially ranked Friday's snowstorm as 16th in Northeast history by one scale and 25th by another.
Meteorologists had warned about particularly nasty weather Friday but said the storm's fury didn't match that of a top-of-the-scale EF5 tornado that struck suburban Moore, where a tornado killed 24 on May 20.
WSJ: Tornado-Hit Oklahoma Struck Again; Mother and Baby Dead
To the south, a severe storm with winds approaching 80 mph rolled into Moore, where a top-of-the-scale EF5 tornado killed 24 on May 20.
WSJ: Tornado-Hit Oklahoma Struck Again; Mother and Baby Dead
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