Although he died in 1998, Dr. Tetsuya Theodore Fujita continues to be one of the most instrumental meteorology figures. He advanced the science of atmospheric science and severe thunderstorms like no other during his time. His legacy still continues today because of his endless devotion to studying and explaning severe weather phenomena. You may recognize the name Fujita; it is the common name for the tornado intensity scale--the Fujita Scale. Recently retired and replaced with the Enhanced Fujita Scale, the Fujita Scale was the first tornado rating scale based on damage severity alone. Mr. Tornado, as he was called, realized that there was a distinct corrolation between damage and tornadic wind speed.
Dr. Theodore Fujita was born in Japan on October 23, 1920 in the small rural town of Kitakyusu. After earning several degrees, including a Doctoral of Science from Tokyo University, Horace Byers encouraged him to come to the University of Chicago to futher his studies and teach meteorology.
Until the late 1970s when Dr. Fujita made extraordinary discoveries in the field of meteorology, tornadic thunderstorms were thought to have one main tornado that caused all of the damage associated with its path. The different wind damage patterns puzzled meteorologists and the general public. After observing and studying thousands of data and images, Dr. Fujita theorized that there were other "mini" tornadoes or vortices--more specifically called multiple vortex tornadoes-- that coexisted in particularly severe thunderstorms. In addition, he believed that thunderstorms had different types of wind shear within them--some surface based phenomenon included downbursts and tornadoes. He opined in several scientific journals that downbursts could be grouped into two distinct categories: either macrobursts or microbursts. The two prefixes simply indicate the magnitude of the damage from the air that falls. If the damage swath is less than 2.5 miles in diameter it is a microburst, if more it is a macroburst. All downbursts are caused by rapidly descending columns of air because of dry layers within a thunderstorm. These columns hit the surface of the Earth and spread rapidly outward. The damage caused by these collapses within cumulonimbus clouds had a distinct and obvious difference with the damage caused by tornadoes. These theories by Dr. Fujita were later proven by other scientists.
Dr. Fujita truly was an old-school scientist. Born in 1920, he was not educated in an age with supercomputers and computer modeling techniques. When the advent of computers did materialize, he believed that the computers simply "didn't understand these [meteorology] things" ("Tornado researcher Ted Fujita died in 1998," 2005).
During his childhood, he was in Japan amidst the growing tensions between the United States and Japan resulting in World War Two. Ironically, Fujita was saved by Mother Nature herself when the weather was overcast, which proved unfavorable for an atomic bomb drop at the Kokura Terminal which was about three miles from where Fujita worked. After the atomic bomb drops on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the Japanese government sent Fujita to study the damage that was inflicted on those areas (Marshall, 1998). It is amazing that the weather saved Dr. Theodore Fujita's life, the very living person that would make unprecedented meteorological discoveries.
I thank him for his work in the atmospheric and meteorological fields. I wish that I would have had the opportunity to meet such an intelligent man and discuss his theories. It has been ten years since his death yet his discoveries are still the foundation of what we know today about mesoscale meteorology. We dedicate this entry to him and his hard work.
(To request references, please contact us.)
No comments:
Post a Comment