1974 Tornado Superoutbreak:
Part 3 – Tornado Forecasting
Green blobs on the 1957 model radar scopes offered little help in predicting the unprecedented tornadic activity of 1974. Forecasters had to wait for visual confirmation of a tornado before issuing warnings, leaving little or no time for residents to seek safety.
Today, advanced technology such as Doppler radar, weather satellites and sophisticated computer models allow forecasters issue better watches and warnings. Doppler radar lets meteorologists see strong thunderstorm winds and identify tornadoes before they touch down, giving those in the path of one a better chance of survival.
"What we saw as a green blob on a World War II-vintage radar scope is now depicted in full color and high resolution detail," said John Forsing, Director of the National Weather Service's eastern region.
The super outbreak of tornadoes and imagery from the event offered meteorologists a unique opportunity to study the relationship between thunderstorms and tornadoes.
"The 1974 Super Outbreak was the largest tornado outbreak on record and there was much that we learned from it, meteorologically," said Stu Ostro, Senior Weather Specialist at The Weather Channel.
For example, the tragedy helped meteorologists better understand why tornadoes could demolish one house while leaving a neighboring home unharmed.
"As the result of the Super Outbreak and the research from it, we were able to dispel the previous myth that tornadoes "skipped", one house being spared while another was destroyed," said Dr. Greg Forbes, Severe Weather Expert at The Weather Channel.
Instead, researchers learned that suction vortices, smaller intense funnel clouds embedded inside a tornado, hit one house and missed another. Ted Fujita, for whom the tornado's intensity scale is named, theorized the existence of these smaller funnels as early as 1965. But proof of their existence, did not come until the Super Outbreak nine years later. Movies taken during the outbreak clearly documented suction vortices inside several additional tornadoes.
"Fujita and I used these movies to reconstruct the wind fields within tornadoes to document just how fast the winds can be in these killer tornadoes," said Forbes who studied under Fujita at The University of Chicago.
