Storm Warning: The Story of a Killer Tornado

by Nancy Mathis

The Doppler radar eventually would allow forecasters and researchers to see inside the clouds. The concept was developed by Christian Andreas Doppler based on sound waves. Doppler noticed that a train whistle becomes higher-pitched as it nears and lower-pitched as it passes by. The nineteenth-century Doppler effect was adapted to twentieth-century radar use. A Doppler radar could determine the intensity and direction of the winds and rain. Modified for thunderstorms, it could allow forecasters to see the telltale signs of rotation from the mesocyclone.

Slowly, these tornado cowboys on the prairie began to pick away at the twister’s secrets or at least create new theories about the tornado. The primary goal of both researchers and forecasters was at least to increase the warning time to give the public a chance to seek shelter. And it was clear they had much work to do.

In 1973, the National Severe Storm Laboratory’s Doppler radar team captured the evolution of a tornado for the first time.

In 1982, Gary England became the first television weather forecaster—actually the first forecaster period—to use Doppler radar.

The last of the 116 Doppler radars was installed in 1998. The procurement process was its own disaster and one that undoubtedly cost lives. Researchers later found that the number of tornado deaths declined by nearly half, to about eighty a year, after NEXRAD became operational.

By 1999, the warning time was eleven minutes—not long but a remarkable improvement since 1974.

Enterprise Electronics improved the commercial Doppler prototype, and in 1991, KWTV purchased the Doppler 9000XL, which included a computer that interpreted the reams of data. After using the computer for a while, Gary convinced KWTV to hire a software programmer to write a program that would estimate a storm’s time of arrival for each city and town in the state. KWTV called the system Storm Tracker, modified it to fit all fifty states, and sold it around the country.

For years, even the simple act of displaying the counties under a storm watch or tornado threat had been difficult. In the past, Gary used an Exacto knife to cut a red-paper outline of every county in the state and posted it on a yellow state background so it would be visible to viewers. A KWTV employee wrote software that automatically posted an outline of the counties under a weather warning. The software display program also was sold to television stations nationwide.

He got him a job as a studio cameraman for the nightly newscasts. Eventually KWTV agreed to pay him as a storm chaser. Val was the first. By 1999, KWTV had twelve chase teams to supplement its regular news crews. Computer technology allowed the chasers to send digital photographs and snippets of video back to KWTV as they tracked the tornado.

After the 1974 Super Outbreak, followed in June by a smaller outbreak in Oklahoma, it was clear the National Weather Service needed to do more to educate the public on tornado preparedness.

Because of the large number of public schools destroyed on April 3, it began an education program for students and administrators. Hallways and small interior rooms were the safest places, gymnasiums and classrooms the most dangerous.

As a tornado is whipping a home like an egg beater, it’s the strength of the construction that could determine whether a family lives or dies.

The coastal areas, especially Florida, have been more accepting of wind mitigation efforts suggested by Texas Tech. “In hurricane-prone regions, there has been more attention paid to standards and codes and enforcement has been better,” Kiesling said. “In tornado regions, there is a somewhat flippant attitude because the incidence of tornadoes and the probability of a tornado occurring in a given location is pretty small and a relatively small percentage of the homes are affected.”

Because of the new equipment, the tools that politicians hadn’t wanted to buy, forecasters were able to give the public an average warning lead time of twenty-one minutes.

All the ordinary landmarks—street signs, neighbors’ houses—were destroyed. Charlie Cusack felt disoriented when he emerged from the rubble that was his home. There was nothing left that gave a sense of place or direction.

It also picked up an eighteen-ton freight train car and dragged it for three-quarters of a mile through a pasture. “Gouge marks were observed in the field every 50 to 100 yards, suggesting the freight car had been airborne for at least a short distance,” the NWS survey noted.

For millennia, people believed the tornado, the great wind, was a capricious act of God, that the tornado descended from the heavens. But it was an optical illusion: the twister spins up rather than down. Condensation from the storm makes the wind coils visible first near the parent cloud, making the funnel appear to descend. But the answer to the tornado riddle may be near the ground, not the sky.

Brooks, who has conducted extensive studies into tornado deaths, estimated that a mobile home resident is twenty times more likely to die than a resident of a site-built home during a tornado. Yet only Minnesota requires mobile home communities to have on-site shelters. Only two cities—Wichita, Kansas, and St. Joseph, Missouri—have similar shelter requirements for mobile home parks.

In the twister-prone states, people are better educated about storms and shelters.

Charlie kept a souvenir from May 3 that displayed the enormous power of the twister. It was a snapshot given to him by his insurance agent. The picture showed a muddy terrycloth house slipper, the soft, rubber-soled kind. The heel of the house slipper was embedded one inch deep in the steel-belted radial tire of a Corvette. That was one of the markers of an F5: “Incredible phenomena can occur.”

Fujita had retired from teaching in 1990 at age seventy but still engaged in research. His main passion was completing his book: Memoirs of an Effort to Unlock the Mystery of Severe Storms, which he self-published in 1992.

Fermi Laboratory.

Ted’s interests were diverse, and he would have succeeded in almost any scientific field with his immense curiosity, intuition, uncanny ability to conceptualize, and his tireless work habits. We were lucky Fujita chose meteorology.”

For storm spotters, the fascination leads to the motivation to go out and spot, and, in turn, to call in reports to the Weather Service, which, in turn, may save lives.”

They called it the Enhanced Fujita Scale, the EF Scale. To reduce the subjectivity, they based the measurements on twenty-eight indicators, taking into account, for instance, the damage caused to a poorly built home versus a well-built home.

Starting in 2007, the National Weather Service will use the EF Scale, copying the same numbering system as the original but with different wind speeds.