Introduction - Severe Convective Storms and Tornadoes: Observations and Dynamics - page 14

An impetus for the study of severe convective storms in particular was an
unlikely set of events that occurred in central Oklahoma on March 20 and
March 25, 1948. After a tornado on March 20 struck Tinker Air Force Base, near
Oklahoma City, causing about $10 million in damage, similar meteorological con-
ditions became evident five days later. Major Ernest Fawbush and Capt. Robert
Miller at Tinker Air Force Base issued a non-public tornado warning; a tornado
did in fact strike again, causing about $6 million in damage. This successful
tornado warning may have been the result of beginner's luck, but it was arguably
a tipping point in the history of severe storm forecasting. The U.S. Weather
Bureau in Kansas City took interest in the forecasting techniques developed by
Fawbush and Miller, and convened a meeting between the Air Force personnel
and forecasters from Washington, D.C. Thus began formal efforts to forecast
severe local storms. Earlier efforts were subdued because it was thought that
tornado forecasts would panic the general populace.
In 1953 a hook echo was serendipitously observed in a tornadic storm in
Champaign, IL and the relationship between the location of a tornado and this
radar signature was noted. The characteristic shape of the radar echo of the storm
would be recognized years into the following decade as a special class of convec-
tive storm. In addition, there was a chance occurrence of a tornado near a radar
site near Waco, Texas also in 1953.
The beginning of the systematic study of severe convective storms thus began
in response to both practical needs and serendipity. The radar, perfected during
World War II, and the rawinsonde, which became part of the operational network
also around World War II, made such subsequent studies possible.
Another important part of observational field experiment history was the
separate efforts of the first amateur storm-chasers Roger Jensen and David
Hoadley in the mid-1950s. The central U. S., where severe storms occur most
often, was a near ideal place to chase storms by automobile, given the relative
flatness of the landscape and long view to the horizon, the availability of a
relatively dense road network, the relative frequency of severe storms during the
spring, and the ease in crossing political boundaries (states). Storm-chasers
(though not termed ''storm-chasers'' until the early 1970s) provided some of the
first systematic visual observations, though serendipitously obtained photographs
of severe storms and tornadoes were also correlated with radar imagery by non-
chaser pioneers such as Ted Fujita. Fujita's landmark analysis of photographs
taken of a tornadic storm in and near Fargo, North Dakota on June 20, 1957 led
to nomenclature such as the ''wall cloud'' and the ''tail cloud''. Fujita, who had
analyzed debris patterns created by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the
end of World War II, had been lured to the University of Chicago by Horace
Byers to do meteorological research.
Other significant visual media collected by non-professional meteorologists
was a movie of a tornado in Dallas, Texas on April 2, 1957, in which flying debris
was clearly seen. The meteorologist Walter Hoecker photogrammetrically analyzed
the debris motion, thereby obtaining the most reliable estimates to date of wind
speeds in tornadoes. So, non-meteorologists chased storms but the fruits of their
labors remained mainly unknown to professional meteorologists, while meteor-
ologists made use of serendipitously obtained photographs and movies taken by