Ted Fujita

Tetsuya Theodore Fujita (October 23, 1920 – November 19, 1998) was a Japanese and American meteorologist whose research primarily focused on severe weather. His research at the University of Chicago on severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons revolutionized the knowledge of each. Although he is best known for creating the Fujita scale of tornado intensity and damage, he also discovered downbursts and microbursts and was an instrumental figure in advancing modern understanding of many severe weather phenomena and how they affect people and communities, especially through his work exploring the relationship between wind speed and damage.

Quotes

• I got into a tremendous argument. [...] You talk about a tornado; people take lots of pictures of a ‘nice’ tornado [which has] one funnel. How can I say there's a small vortex running around, dancing around? [They] said: ‘You're dead wrong.’ But I still pursued my concept.
  • As quoted by Bob Henson of The Weather Channel [1]

• Indianapolis TV stations sent me a beautiful [movie] that showed my suction vortices dancing around, and I went to the spot to find exactly what I expected. One house was damaged; the one right next to it was standing, untouched. Houses located in between the path of suction vortices left standing confirmed everything.
  • As quoted by Bob Henson of The Weather Channel [2]

• I have always been interested in conducting observational experiments, large or small, making use of aircraft, radar, satellite, etc. I also like to collect my personal data and analyze them when I am tired of doing scientific research for too long. [...] During the four postwar years in Japan, I experienced a 10,000% inflation rate. Keeping the bitter memory in mind, I worked on my own financial experiment from time to time while drinking glasses of beer.
  • As quoted by Kirstin Butler of PBS [3]

Quotes about Fujita

• Ted had an amazing curiosity to investigate everything. [His] publications still set the standard which we can only improve upon but never replace.
  • James LaDue of NWS Warning Decision Training Division as quoted by The Weather Channel [4]

• He was so much more than ‘Mr. Tornado.’ He had a way to beautifully organize observations that would speak the truth of the phenomenon he was studying. He taught people how to think about these storms in a creative way that gets the storm, its behavior. He has so many legacies.
  • Professor Douglas MacAyeal [5]

• I consider him, and most people do, the father of tornado research. Nobody thought there were would be multiple vortices in a tornado but there are. There are small swirls within tornadoes. That’s what helps explain why damage is so funky in a tornado.
  • AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Dan Kottlowski [6]

• I consider my time spent with Ted the personal highlight of my professional career. I started at the University of Chicago unsure of my abilities to succeed. I left with a wealth of knowledge and confidence that I could successfully embark on a teaching and research career. Fujita was a demanding advisor, but his enthusiasm, deep insights, and ability to conceptualize mesoscale processes were truly inspiring. Ted loved to argue with other researchers when there was pushback for his suction vortex model, the existence of microbursts, and the accuracy of his windspeed estimates based on the F-scale. Debates on these topics seem to energize him, and he often said that time would prove that his theories were correct. I was always in awe that his seminars and other public events would be literally packed to the rafters. He was a brilliant speaker and one of the greatest spokespersons for our community. I often think that today's TED talks were appropriately named after him.
  • Roger Wakimoto as quoted by The Weather Channel [7]

• As a tornado nerd growing up in Minnesota in the 1980s, Fujita was a supernatural figure. I consider myself an heir of his scientific legacy. No matter which line of scientific inquiry I make in my tornado research, I always seem to come back to Fujita's books and papers. [...] Even today with mobile Doppler radars, accurate wind measurements in tornadoes are exceedingly rare. Fujita recognized that the only consistently available indicator of a tornado's wind speed is the damage path that it leaves behind. By studying hundreds of tornado damage tracks, he was able to correlate damage to a standard indicator (a well-built house) to wind speeds, thereby creating the Fujita scale that is the basis for the Enhanced Fujita scale that we use today. All of this research was done without the aid of Doppler radars, drones, or machine learning.
  • Professor Robin Tanamachi of Purdue University as quoted by The Weather Channel [8]

• What made Ted unique was his forensic or engineering approach to meteorology. [...] Only Ted would spend dozens of hours lining up 100-plus photos of the Fargo [North Dakota] tornado to create a timeline so he could study the birth, life and death of that tornado. Ted was absolutely meticulous.
  • Mike Smith, former senior vice president of AccuWeather [9]

• I was struck, as a child first learning about Fujita's work, by how even I could understand many of his graphics. They were simultaneously highly complex and yet crystal clear in their content and messaging….practically works of art, even more so because each image or frame of animation was painstakingly drafted by Fujita's own hand. As a junior scientist, the lesson I took is that one can almost never spend too much time perfecting a figure. It will be remembered long after the accompanying, explanatory text is forgotten.
  • Professor Robin Tanamachi of Purdue University as quoted by The Weather Channel [10]

• People would just say, 'That was a weak tornado, or that was a strong tornado,’ and that was pretty much before his scale came out, that's how it was recorded. But now even today you say EF5, or back in Fujita's day, F5 -- people know exactly what you're talking about.
  • Roger Wakimoto as quoted by AccuWeather [11]

• He used to say that the computer doesn’t understand these things.
  • Meteorologist Duane Stiegler [12]

• The Japanese had the habit of sticking pieces of bamboo into the ground at cemeteries to hold flowers. So he went to all of the graveyards around town and measured the burn shadows on the insides of the bamboo flutes—the sides that had been facing away from the explosion. And just from that, he was able to triangulate very precisely where the bomb had come from and how far up in the sky it had been when it exploded.
  • Professor Emeritus Alfred Ziegler [13]

• He said people shouldn’t be afraid to propose ideas. You don’t want to be so scared that you don’t propose something you believe in.
  • Roger Wakimoto [14]