T. Theodore Fujita

T. Theodore was born on October 23, 1920 in Kitakyūshū City, Japan. Fujita earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1943 from Meiji College of Technology located in Japan. Later he moved to the United States and joined the meteorology department at the University of Chicago. He became a United States citizen and took the name 'Theodore" as a middle name. He introduced the basic concepts of thunderstorm architecture. For example, he introduced the terms wall cloud and tail cloud.

The Palm Sunday outbreak of 1965 changed the course of how we view a tornado outbreak because Fujita concluded that there was indeed something special about certain tornadoes... that they must contain more than one vortex. 

His most important contributions include:  

-His creation of the standard scale for rating the severity of tornadoes. Theodore Fujita's scale system is a scale of tornado severity that ranges from  numbers from 0 to 5. Five is a complete destruction and zero being a minimal destruction. 

-His discovery of the role of sudden violent down-bursts of air that sometimes cause airplanes to crash.These violent downbursts are called microbursts. He explained that the air sinking down toward the ground eventually disperse in many directions causing the plain to loose control. 

Tetsuya Fujita suffered an illness which lead to his death on November 19, 1998 in Chicago, IL. Through him other fields were able to improve as well.Without him the field of meteorology would not be as advanced as it is now.