Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado

by Nancy Mathis

The Woodward twister would be the first of a series of deadly postwar tornadoes to kill 100 or more people. Still, Weather Bureau forecasters, on orders from Washington, would not issue tornado forecasts or warnings. The United States had just won a global war, unlocked the secrets of the atom, and was the major military power in the world—but it would not utter the word tornado.

All of this meant Norman served as the unofficial weather weenie capital of the world. A weather weenie is someone, as they say in Oklahoma, who is “eaten up with it,” someone who cannot get enough of extreme weather, obsessed by storms in all their permutations, and especially severe thunderstorms.

IT IS EASIER TO send a space probe to Jupiter than it is to forecast the weather. Some of the world’s fastest computers—those processing trillions of pieces of data per second—are devoted to meteorology. Chaos theory—the idea that the most infinitesimal change can result in wildly varied outcomes—comes from meteorology. Meteorology is full of predictions and probabilities and very little certainty. It’s all math and physics and fluid dynamics, thermal dynamics, and various other dynamics that make it one of the most difficult sciences to master.

The atmosphere seeks a constant blue-sky equilibrium and purges itself of anything that upsets its delicate balance. And something is always working against it.

During the day in the spring, the dryline is shoved eastward. It is felt, not seen. As it passes, the humidity drops, the skies clear, and the winds shift again. Wind aloft pushes the top of the dryline faster than its bottom, causing it to blanket the top of the warm, moist air mass. It forms a cap over the top of the warm, moist air. This is where the real atmospheric battle starts, about 1,000 feet from the surface.

The upper levels of the dryline act like the lid on a teakettle, topping the warm, moist air until the air mass becomes so warm and so humid that it no longer can be held back. It continually jabs until the dryline weakens. This is what the chasers come to see. The warm, moist current bursts through the dryline cap and blasts skyward at 100 miles per hour into the colder dry air above.

The fluffy cumulus clouds form first as the moisture in the warm air updraft hits the cooler dry winds and condenses. The condensation releases latent heat, which creates energy, which creates more vertical speed, which sucks in more warm, moist air, which forces the cooler air to sink ever faster, and the cycle begins. The cumuli begin to fatten and darken. The warm air updraft builds on a column of condensing particles, and the tower of clouds bubbles 30,000 to 40,00...

Because of the dryline storm explosions, the Great Plains also has a propensity to produce a rare and fierce type of thunderstorm: a supercell. It is super in every way. The tower soars to 50,000 or 60,000 feet and bumps against the stratosphere, flattening at the top to give it the distinctive appearance of a blacksmith’s anvil. A supercell draws in warm air with such power that the updraft begins to swirl horizontally. The entire back side of the supercell rotates like a 1950s version of a flying saucer. The horizontally rotating mass, called a mesocyclone, is the first clue to radar observers that a thunderstorm could produce a tornado. The mesocyclone produces a “hook echo” on radar, the appearance of a fishhook or a backward letter J as it swirls the winds. The hook echo almost alw...

Fully matured, the supercell is more than twice the height of Mount Everest. The lightning begins to ripple—anvil crawlers, they’re called—and the thunder echoes. It’s the supercell t...

TORNADOES ARE A PECULIARLY American phenomenon. They can happen anywhere in the world, but 80 percent—roughly 800 to 1,000 a year—occur in the United States. Most occur in the spring, along the stretch of pl...

But the first tornado ever recorded in the United States was in the most unlikely of pla...

An average-size tornado can produce enough energy to supply an American home with electric power for a year.

the more compact tornado packs a far greater punch than a hurricane. A hurricane can cause more structural damage because its sustained winds last for hours, compared to the seconds of a tornado. A hurricane gives fair warning days in advance; a tornado is completely random, its warning time measured in minutes.

A tornado is meteorology’s last great puzzle, and its grandest celebrity.

By horse and buggy, he traveled to the Central Plains to examine the results of a tornado outbreak in 1879.

Finley noted the horror’s lingering impact on the survivors: “The effect upon the people was pitiful in the extreme. Night after night hundreds of people never went to bed, but remained dressed and with their lanterns trimmed, watching for a fresh onslaught which they expected momentarily. Every dark cloud or sudden increase in the velocity of the wind seemed to fill them with evil forebodings which could not be allayed until every vestige of supposed danger had vanished.”

The forecasts were short-lived. In 1887, nervous superiors sent him new instructions: the word tornado was banned from his forecasts. He was ordered to refer to “severe local storms” rather than use the word tornado. Other weather officers received the same order. There were economic reasons. Businessmen in Iowa and other territories complained that Finley was giving potential investors the idea that their region was twister prone.

“It is believed that the harm done by such predictions would eventually be greater than that which results from the tornado itself.” The government would maintain that position for sixty years.

Nature holds her secrets in an iron grip, but we are wresting them from her.”

On March 18, 1925, the Weather Bureau predicted “rains and shifting winds” for Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. It would be the agency’s greatest blunder. Survivors recall the sky turning day into night as it darkened with the brewing thunderstorm. About 1:00 p.m. near Ellington, Missouri, it produced a tornado so massive, so destructive, and so deadly that it still holds the record for the largest killer twister ever.

From Missouri through southern Illinois and into Indiana, the Tri-State twister traveled 219 miles in three and a half hours, moving at more than twice the speed of a usual tornado. It overran one town after another. The only warning was whatever citizens saw coming at them. It leveled farmhouses, neighborhoods, schools, and office buildings. By 4:30 p.m., when it dissipated, the dead totaled 695. It remains the deadliest tornado in history.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the death toll from tornadoes mounted. There were no warnings, no time for people to seek shelter. On April 5, 1936, a twister in Mississippi killed 216 people in Tupelo. The next day, the same violent storm system spaw...

In 1938, as fatalities rose, the Weather Bureau lifted its ban on the use of the word tornado but mainly in its alerts to emergency personnel, not to the public. No fo...

In spite of advancements in meteorology and technology, a system of tornado forecasting and warnings was as nonexistent in 1940 as it had been in 1870.”

The year 1953 would prove to be a benchmark for weather and weather research. Not since 1953 has one tornado killed 100 people or more. U.S. Weather Bureau tornado warnings, the rise of television, and even the fear of nuclear war would coincide to bring a modicum of relief from the deadly twisters. And in 1953, Tetsuya Fujita arrived in America.

It was the work of the Norwegians that created the modern weather map, based on the battle schemes of World War I.

The standardized weather map included boundaries between cool and warm air fronts. Cold fronts were marked with a line of triangles reminiscent of spiked World War I German helmets and the warm front with the rounded half-circles similar to British helmets. Much of the language of meteorology related to warfare.

He looked for moisture, instability, lift, and shear—the building blocks for a severe storm.

Forecasting is an effort to answer as many “maybes” as possible with as much confidence as possible.

The SPC awaited data from morning balloon soundings. Twice each day at 0 and 1200 Greenwich Mean Time—Zulu time, or Z for zero, to meteorologists—weather stations worldwide sent aloft six-foot latex balloons with radio transmitters attached. In Norman, National Weather Service forecasters released their balloons at 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., central daylight time.

“The joke is you could slam your car door and start a storm,” said Rich. “It’s not quite that easy, but these little subtle things are hard to observe. Sometimes it can be little terrain features. Or someplace that is irrigated farmland next to farmland that isn’t irrigated.”

Forecasters also measured the convective available potential energy (CAPE) based on balloon soundings. Using dew points at different altitudes and surface temperatures, they can estimate how fast a particle of air can rise. The higher the CAPE value, the faster the air particle soars upward. The CAPE gives meteorologists an idea of the strength of the warm updraft should it break through the cap.

Tatsu Maki—Dragon Swirl—originated

On a cold day in January 1951, a letter postmarked from Chicago arrived at Fujita’s physics office at the university. Fujita called it simply “the most important letter I received in my life.”

With his new twenty dollars, Fujita bought a three-day supply of Fig Newtons and Coca-Cola for the Chicago-bound train trip. As the train pulled away from the Southern Pacific Station in Oakland, he ate his first fig bar for lunch; one at breakfast as the train passed the Great Salt Lake; another for lunch as the train departed Green River, Wyoming; one for dinner during a stop in eastern Nebraska; and the last only for survival as the train rocked toward Chicago on August 12, 1953. He would never eat Fig Newtons again.

Fujita, with his cartography skills, was able not only to explain but also to diagram the mesolows, mesohighs, and mesocyclones, the word meso indicating those weather systems up to 250 miles wide. At the same time, he and Tepper created a new language for researchers and provided forecasters with a critical clue for predicting a tornado. Their groundbreaking work was published as Weather Bureau Research Paper No. 39.

The very idea of mesoscale research was new. The violent weather on the plains rarely stemmed from the large-scale, or what meteorologists call synoptic, events, but from these smaller-pressure highs and lows that boiled upward as burly storms on spring afternoons.

The power and the behavior of the tornado fas...

In 1956, he returned with his wife and Kazuya. No fig bars this time, just a head full of ideas and a new name: Tetsuya became Theodore or Ted.

June 20, 1957, motorists traveling to Fargo, North Dakota, reported to police that a “very large swirling cloud” was moving toward the city.

When Byers heard rumors of a large number of photographs of the storm and tornado, he asked Fujita to investigate. Rarely had a tornado and its parent been so well documented.

Fujita’s study was a landmark achievement, the first documentation of a supercell thunderstorm. It was, said his admirers, his seminal work. He provided terminology—wall cloud, tail cloud, and other terms—that would become the standard language of tornado research and forecasting.

He concluded that “the tornadoes in the Fargo area did not occur by chance but were the product of well organized conditions very favorable for tornado formation.”

By chance, researchers with the Illinois State Water Survey studying rain in powerful storms had discovered a “hook echo” effect on radar in 1953. Fujita and other researchers would associate that radar image with the swirling mesocyclone, giving weather forecasters at least a signature for potentially tornadic storms.

If one could gather enough clues, the mystery of severe storms and their offspring could be solved—a meteorological crime scene investigation.

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik.

For Fujita, it was another tool with which to observe the clouds.

Applications Technology Satellite (ATS-1) was the first geostationary satellite, launched in 1966.

“Ted was an idea man,” said Charles Doswell III, a scientist at the National Severe Storms Lab. “Ideas flew from his brain like sparks from a grinding wheel.”

Starting in the early 1960s, scientists began trying to convert the Doppler radar into a weather radar.