August 9, 1945 - Nagasaki, The Bomb, And Moore, Oklahoma

My partner returned from a storm chase back in 1999 and had a really strange look on his face. When I asked him what was wrong, he told me that he and his fellow chasers, had traveled up I-35 on their way to a storm system north of Oklahoma City. Their route passed through Moore, Oklahoma a city that had been devastated just a few weeks before by a massive F5 tornado. He said the scene was heartbreaking. If I remember correctly he compared it to Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

August 8, marks the anniversary of the (so far) last atomic bomb dropped on a populated area. It is ironic that the “F” rating and the A-bomb have a relationship beyond the devastation they cause. The original target for that second atomic bomb was the arsenal at Kokura, Japan. Clouds precluded this drop and the secondary target of Nagasaki was used instead.

This twist of fate spared the life of budding Meteorologist Tetsuya Fujita who was attending college nearby. Fujita was among the first to examine the damage done by the bomb at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He used his mathematical and observational skills to calculate the hypocenter of the blasts.

His fascination with the destruction and how the events leading to that destruction could be extrapolated from the results ended up tying him to Moore, Oklahoma and every other scene of tornado damage in the United States. He is better known as Ted Fujita, the father of the “F” scale (Fujita Scale now the Enhanced Fujita Scale) which measures damage done by tornados and calculates estimated wind speed from the storm.

His pioneering work in the field of tornados has spared the lives of thousands of Americans. It seems no small irony that weather saved his life as well.