A tornado was spotted in Hyde Park last week.
It was no Wizard of Oz-style twister. It hurled no trees, destroyed no mobile-home parks, took no lives. It didn`t make the evening news.
This tornado was only about 3 feet tall. And it occurred indoors, just like the white tornado from the old TV ads.
The cyclone was summoned forth by Tetsuya Theodore Fujita, a University of Chicago professor of geophysical science. Using dry ice and a specially constructed machine, he and his associate, James Partacz, created the funnel cloud in their laboratory.
After the baby twister got going, Fujita crouched near it to prove a point. Using a ruler to spear the tornado at its base, he tried to make it change course or disappear. But this scale-model storm was as uncontrollable as the real thing.
”It is not practical to stop tornado,” said Fujita, whose English still shows signs of his Japanese roots. ”So the best thing is education. Deaths can be reduced by education. Of course, if you don`t respond you die.”
Saving lives through his research and knowledge has been Fujita`s goal since he began studying severe weather almost 45 years ago in his native Japan. His work, especially on tornadoes and their aftermath, has led to a better understanding of the atmospheric conditions that spawn cyclones and the violent characteristics of such unruly storms. As the world`s recognized authority on tornadoes, Fujita is known to many in meteorology simply as Mr. Tornado.
No less important, however, are Fujita`s discoveries of menaces to aviation known as downbursts and microbursts. These are strong downdrafts from clouds that cause dangerous wind shears at or near ground level. Such winds during a plane`s critical takeoff or approach runs can cause disastrous results, such as the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane in June 1975 at New York`s Kennedy International Airport. Fujita identified the phenomenon after being asked to help determine the cause of the crash, which at first was blamed on the pilot.
Then there`s his pioneering work in an area called mesometeorology. That`s the study of weather patterns from 10 to 100 miles from a given point, the most useful range when forecasting the probability that violent weather will strike a particular locale.
The oft-honored Fujita, a wiry and perky 69-year-old, will retire at the end of the year. Not because he`s tuckered out. Rather, the university has a mandatory retirement age of 70.
Truth be told, though his doctors have urged him to take life easier, Fujita still races his students up the four flights of stairs to his lab. His best time? Twenty-one seconds. ”I can rest when I die. That`s pretty good time, don`t you think?” he asks a visitor.
Fujita is also a tireless (some might say obsessed, even eccentric)
collector of data. He collects not only reams of weather information, but all manner of seemingly unrelated statistics.
He has plotted the Dow Jones Industrial Averages from 1920, the year of his birth, to the present despite not owning a single stock. ”I don`t like it,” he says of stock investing. He keeps a detailed chart of his weight and blood pressure and sometimes measures both several times a day. ”Whenever I go to Japan I always gain an awful lot of weight and my blood pressure goes up when I`m stuck with a research problem,” he says.
Among other graphs: his household`s consumption of natural gas for the last 10 years, the consumer price index going back decades, his airline flights, a chronology of his personal history and his grant funding. ”You probably think that I`m crazy,” he says.
”I like to follow change, like a cat follows movement,” explains Fujita. ”When bird comes near, a cat will catch it. He may not eat it. It`s just the movement he likes. I like anything that changes. That`s why I like the weather. Especially Chicago. You know what they say, if you don`t like the weather here, just wait a few minutes.”
Too calm in Japan
Fujita`s first scientific research wasn`t of a natural tempest but of the man-made atomic storms over Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. As a young assistant physics professor, he spent four days in each of the destroyed cities, exposing himself to fallout as he photographed the damage. ”I never sat or touched anything. But ever since then, I`ve been checking my blood count regularly. So far nothing`s happened,” he says.
Later, he began studying nature`s violent storms. But it dawned on him that if he wanted to understand tornadoes, he needed to be in the U.S. ”In Japan, there are no more than 15 tornadoes a year, so it might take me 10 years to study 150. Here there are 750 every year. I could study 150 in two months.”
In 1956, he accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago and began to establish a reputation as a meticulous researcher.
The destruction scale
Fujita`s work went beyond severe storms. He was a pioneer in the use of satellite photography. He invented a grid system called the Fujita Technique that allowed photos of clouds taken from space to be superimposed over geographic areas before computers simplified such efforts.
But tornadoes have been his passion. Over the years, he and his assistants have amassed 30,000 photos of tornado damage that have allowed him to infer many things about tornado mechanics. He figures he`s flown 20,000 miles in small planes to photograph and assess the destruction tornadoes leave.
The Fujita Scale is the accepted measure of a tornado`s force: F0 being the weakest with winds of 42 m.p.h. to 72 m.p.h. that break twigs and branches and mangle signboards. F5, at the other extreme, has winds of 261 m.p.h. to 318 m.p.h. and causes ”incredible” damage, lifting strong frame houses off their foundations, according to Fujita. It can also launch a car like a missile more than 300 feet through the air.
Perhaps Fujita`s most startling discovery, however, was the downburst and microburst. Since the late 1940s, scientists have known that thunderstorm clouds have powerful downdrafts, winds that rush down out of such clouds.
But it was thought that downdrafts weakened long before they got near the ground.
Still, something mysterious was happening to airplanes on takeoffs and landings. ”If you read the old issues of ALPA (Air Line Pilot Association)
magazine, you`ll see stories where old-timers say, `My plane just quit flying,”` says Kenneth Plunkett, research director of the Aviation Safety Institute in Ohio. ”People would say the pilots were nuts or that if they had trouble landing it was their fault.”
When the Eastern Airlines plane crashed, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed the fatal accident on the pilots. Eastern officials didn`t buy that. There had been a thunderstorm in the area of the airport. They approached Fujita and asked him what else might explain the crash.
He combed thousands of his photos and found maybe 100 where trees were blown down not in the swirl pattern typical of spinning tornadoes but in a radial manner like the spokes of a wheel.
One evening, exhausted, he left the office, went home and was having a glass of cold beer when the solution hit him. The unusual tree damage was caused by a downdraft that didn`t weaken as it rushed to earth and hit the ground, where it spread out in the same starburst pattern that`s formed when water from a hose strikes the driveway pavement.
The Eastern jet was likely caught in what Fujita dubbed a downburst. (A microburst is similar but smaller.) As a plane first confronts the downdraft, it encounters a headwind. Moments later, another burst of air from behind robs its wings of lift: wind shear.
”Nobody accepted it. I made a few calls and just about everybody said,
`No, you don`t have any evidence,”` says Fujita. But he persisted. In 1978, with help from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, he set up an experiment using Doppler radar at O`Hare Airport.
”I caught the wind coming down, hitting the ground and spreading out at the height of only 100 feet,” says Fujita. ”That was a big triumph. I found it.
”All of a sudden I started to receive lots of calls from airline pilots. `You proved it. We support you,”` he remembers them saying. ”All of a sudden I was in the limelight. I knew my record-keeping was important.”
”You can`t say enough about his work,” says Harold Marthinsen, the pilot association`s director of accident investigations. ”At a time when other people were looking at the big picture, he got into the nitty gritty and found microbursts. He`s contributed greatly to our understanding of many accidents.” He cited the Delta crash in Dallas.
Data, not steak
Largely because of Fujita`s work, the Federal Aviation Administration plans to install Doppler radar at airports, starting in 1993. The radar would warn pilots of dangerous downbursts, microbursts and wind shears.
In November, he was awarded the Vermeil Gold Medal from the French National Academy on Air and Space for his discovery of microbursts and contribution to aviation safety. Fujita, a U.S. citizen, was the first foreign national to receive the award.
Characteristically, he spent the entire Air France flight jotting down data. While his wife enjoyed a steak lunch in the cabin, he sat in the cockpit, a guest of the crew, spurned his meal and took a hundred photos and copious notes on altitude, temperature and wind speed.
Once home, he made a holiday greeting card. It had charts showing the Concorde`s position at 10-minute intervals superimposed on a satellite photo, cloud distribution along the Paris to New York route and such. ”I can eat steak and have beer anytime,” says Fujita. ”Why should I eat? After you digest the food, what do you have? Nothing.”
