The First Operational Tornado Forecast Twenty Million to One

Abstract

The close knit world of the tornado and severe thunderstorm forecaster often seems somewhat demented to those not knowledgeable in this discipline. This apparent derangement is based on our seemingly ghoulish expressions of joy and satisfaction displayed whenever we verify a tornado forecast. This aberration is not vicious; tornadoes in open fields make us happier than damaging storms and count just as much for or against us. We beg your indulgence, but point out the sad truism that we rise and fall by the blessed verification numbers. There is a fantastic feeling of accomplishment when a tornado forecast is successful. We are really nice people but odd. ROBERT C. MILLER, COLONEL, USAF March 20, 1948. I was assigned forecasting duty in the Tinker Air Force Base Weather Station, under command of Major Ernest J. Fawbush (E.J. to me), on the first of March 1948 [Fig. 1]. The evening of March 20th, while on the evening shift, I was rudely awakened to the sometimes vicious vagaries of Mother Nature. There were two of us on shift that night. My backup forecaster was a Staff Sergeant, also new to the Tinker Weather Station. We analyzed the latest surface weather maps and upper charts and arrived at the sage conclusion that except for moderately gusty surface winds, we were in for a dry and dull night. We were not astute enough to note that the upper-air analyses, received in completed form over the facsimile net from the USWB in Washington, depicted erroneously analyzed moisture fields. We issued a Base warning for gusty surface winds up to 35 mph without thunderstorms, effective at 9 P.M. local time. This forecast gravely underestimated the gravity of the situation. Shortly after 9 P.M., stations to our west and southwest began reporting lightning and by 9:30 thunderstorms were in progress and, to our surprise, detectable only twenty miles to the southwest of the Base. Even on our crotchety old AN-PQ-13 radar (Originally intended and used as a bomb-aiming radar on B-29's in WW II, this radar was extensively employed for storm detection by Air Weather Service in the Postwar period. It had an ostensible range of 100 miles.), the leading thunderstorm cells looked vicious and were moving very fast. The Sergeant began typing up a warning for thunderstorms accompanied by stronger gusts even though we were too late to alert the Base and secure the aircraft. At 9:52 P.M. the squall line moved across Will Rodgers Airport 7 miles to our west southwest. To our horror they reported a heavy thunderstorm with winds gusting to 92 miles per hour and worst of all at the end of the message, ''TORNADO SOUTH ON GROUND MOVING NE!'' We had had it for certain! We could only pray that this storm would change course and move southeast. There was no such miracle and at 10 P.M. the large tornado, visible in a vivid background of continuous lightning, and accompanied by crashing thunder began moving from the southwest to northeast across the base. We watched it, not really believing, as it passed just east of the large hangars and the operations ...

Progress toward developing a practical societal response to severe convection (2005 EGU Sergei Soloviev Medal Lecture)

“…As Galway has described, however, Finley fell out of favor with his superiors and severe storm forecasting was discontinued in the USA until after World War II. On 25 March 1948, the first successful tornado forecast of the modern era was issued by Air Force officers E. J. Fawbush and R. C. Miller (see Miller and Crisp, 1999a). This led first to the formation of a centralized office for forecasting severe convective storms for the military (Miller and Crisp, 1999b) and then ultimately to a centralized office dedicated to severe storms forcasting in the NWS (at the time known as the US Weather Bureau) in March of 1952, now known as the Storm Prediction Center, or SPC (Corfidi, 1999).…”

An Artificially Intelligent System for the Automated Issuance of Tornado Warnings in Simulated Convective Storms

“…As early as the 1880s, an automated tornado warning system was envisioned using telegraph wires to trigger public alerts when winds exceeded 70 miles per hour (Holden 1883;Coleman and Pence 2009). Following the successful tornado forecast by Fawbush andMiller in 1948 (Miller andCrisp 1999), the first tornado forecasts were issued to the public throughout the 1950s (Galway 1989;Doswell et al 1993). Over the next seven decades, tornado forecasts evolved and transformed into the modern tornado warnings currently issued by the National Weather Service (Coleman et al 2011).…”