Tracking the storm that hit Dennis Hixenbaugh's house in Warrenton on March 1, 2007, it looked like a tornado.

But the storm hit at night, and so the extent of the damage was unclear.

While Warrenton and Thomson residents spent the next day cleaning up, a team led by National Weather Service Meteorologist Steve Naglic arrived from Columbia to determine if it was a tornado, and if so, how strong.

These teams gather as much information as they can as to where the damage is, plot that on a map, and then plan a route that they go along to assess the types of damage.

Theodore Fujita was the first scientist to relate tornado damage to wind speed.

His storm surveys were groundbreaking and the Fujita, or F, scale is named for him.

But new technology has allowed wind engineers and architects to improve on Fujita's method.

Using wind tunnels and air cannons, they calculated how much wind does how much damage.

Meteorologists have found it takes less wind to do the severe degrees of damage that we saw in the old F-scale.

On the old F-scale, the strongest tornadoes were estimated to have winds of over 300 miles per hour.

On the new, enhanced Fujita scale, similarly strong tornadoes have winds only 200 miles per hour or greater.

When Naglic surveys a storm, he now looks at specific damage indicators, like brick buildings, framed barns, and trees. then, he determines the degree of damage for each.

Thanks to this new technology we now have a better idea of what kind of winds really hit Thomson.

This will help us learn how to build safer homes - minimizing damage like that suffered by Hixenbaugh.