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Theodore Fujita's Life

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“If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased” (Katharine Hepburn). This was true for Doctor Tetsuya Theodore Fujita. All the way up to his death he studied that which interested him. Even being ill and bedridden didn’t stop him. A colleague James Partacz was quoted saying that “[h]e did research from his bed till the very end”. It was on October 23, 1920 that Tetsuya Fujita was born. He lived on the island of Kyushu in Kitakyushu City, the southernmost island of Japan. His mother, Tomojiro Fujita, and father, Yoshie Fujita, named him Tetsuya, meaning “philosopher”. At a young age Fujita became interested in maps after he taught himself surveying techniques. A clever child, Heidorn mentions that in his youth he visited …show more content…

This was Fujita’s first study of a U.S. tornado. Most considered studying this tornado to be impossible. The closest weather station was at the airport miles away, the other tens of miles. The tornado itself was measured in hundreds of yards, finding the genesis of it seemed an unattainable goal. This did not stop Fujita. As Smith described it, “Fujita wasn’t an ordinary meteorologist. He had a creative perspective and a mind that viewed the world in four dimensions: the north/south dimension, the east/west dimension, the vertical dimension (altitude), and time” (118). Fujita devised a plan. The storm was slow moving and as such there were hundreds of photos and film footage of it. With the help of a local news agency Fujita managed to obtain 150 photographs of the tornado at different times and places. The difficulty of even finding these photos was immense as during this time finding tornado photographs was rare. From these photos he triangulated the location of the storm in each photo to create a chronological path of the storm that he could use to track the evolution of the tornado. At this day in age, this was something no other meteorologist could do, in fact what he did in this study was almost single-handedly create the art of meteorological photogrammetry. Using his work he was able to extrapolate a never before seen view of the evolution of a thunderstorm with a …show more content…

With help from the National Severe Storms Laboratory, he studied thousands of miles of damage created by hundreds occurring in April 1974. He discovered that downdrafts from the storms had enough strength to reach the ground and create unique damage patterns. His theory was met with skepticism until in 1978 when the National Center for Atmospheric Research aided him in his research. They went to Chicago and detected 52 downbursts in 42 days. Fujita showed that damage that had thought to be done by tornadoes was actually caused by downbursts. Fujita was quoted saying that “After I pointed out the existence of downbursts, the number of tornadoes [listed] in the United States

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