What Stands in a Storm by Kim Cross

prediction sometimes found themselves singing in the wind.
    The first scientific inquiry into tornado forecasting met curious resistance. In the 1870s, John Park Finley, a farmer’s son from Michigan, began what he called “a systematic study of the storms of the United States, especially those of a violent character, namely, tornadoes.” In his twenties, he was working at the US Army Signal Service (later renamed the Signal Corps) in Philadelphia, where he devoted his spare time to studying tornadoes. He compiled his findings in an elaborate report that was submitted and approved for publication, but then, mysteriously, lost.
    The six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound young man with the handlebar mustache was not easily deterred. He got a break in 1879 when the Signal Corps sent him out to survey a disaster zone in the wake of a tornado outbreak in the Central Plains. Afterward, he suggested that a warning unit should be established in Kansas City, Missouri, to obtain weather reports and spread the word locally when conditions in the area were ripe for twisters. Subsequently, he gathered every known tornado report in the last century to look for patterns. Finley’s 1882 report, “The Character of 600 Tornadoes,” was the most comprehensive treatise ever written on the matter and became the basis for his later forecasting efforts. He traveled throughout the Central Plains, enlisting more than 957 “tornado reporters”—the precursor to today’s storm spotters. And he continued to analyze hundreds of storms, including a famous outbreak of sixty funnels that killed an estimated eight hundred people on February 19, 1884.
    Once or twice a day throughout the stormy months of March and April, he specified when conditions were both favorable and unfavorable for tornadoes. “It requires as much, and often more, study to saythat no tornadoes will occur as to make the prediction that conditions are favorable for their development,” he wrote. (He could say that today and still be right.) When conditions were unfavorable, he was 99 percent accurate, but when he specified conditions favorable, tornadoes occurred only 28 percent of the time. Still, not bad for a relatively nascent science. And Finley’s efforts to compare his forecasts to what actually happened were the beginning of what is now called forecast verification.
    Unfortunately, at the peak of Finley’s career, forecasting got political and a hot debate raged about whether the weather service should be under military or civilian control. Ultimately his superiors terminated his tornado studies in the late 1800s and ordered him to halt all predictions, discouraging use of the word “tornado” on the grounds that it would incite public panic—a harm they judged greater than injuries and damage inflicted by the storm itself. The word remained verboten for decades, and tornado research and forecasting fell into a dark ages of sorts until the late 1940s.
    In 1945, the Thunderstorm Project began—a collaboration between the Weather Bureau, the Army Air Forces, the Navy, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA’s predecessor). World War II was coming to a close. Radar had been invented recently and, almost by accident, discovered to be useful for meteorology. As radar detected the presence of enemy aircraft and ships, military operators noticed signals irritatingly “cluttered” with weather echoes, but meteorologists saw the silver lining: radar made a mostly invisible phenomenon visible, providing something akin to a sonogram of a thunderstorm being born.
    The Thunderstorm Project aimed to dissect a thunderstorm, inside and out. Trained military pilots flew directly into thunderstorms in twin-propeller fighter planes rugged enough to withstand the strong winds. Stacked five high every five thousand feet, the pilots penetrated a thunderhead over and over, and relinquished their controls to