Courtesy: Ft. Worth Star-Telegram Used with permission Today is the 40th anniversary of the crash at Delta 191 at DFW International Airport. The terrible crash killed 136. Twenty-five were injured; some of the injuries were horrific. The story begins with Dr. Ted Fujita examining the crashes of Ozark Flight 809 in St. Louis (1973) and Eastern Flight 66 at JFK in New York (1975). Ted published a paper in the journal Monthly Weather Review  (February, 1977) hypothesizing the existence of a "downburst" -- a previously undiscovered feature of thunderstorms -- that could cause extreme wind shear which in turn would cause planes to crash.  In the summer of 1978, Ted ran Project NIMROD and found a downburst via radar and measured its characteristics. A couple of weeks later, I was storm chasing with my friend meteorologist Steve Amburn and I was able to take a series of seven photos that -- for the first time -- showed what a downburst looked like and its life-cycle. One of the phot...

USAir 1016's wreckage on the west side of Charlotte-Douglas International Airport Many times, we have discussed the terrible airline crashes caused by downbursts. Examples, here and here . Several times this summer, there has been significant downburst damage to towns and cities.  But, Ted Fujita's discovery was important to atmospheric science in other ways. Kathleen and I were cleaning out some files last week and ran across this.  Notice the sub-headline, Tornado May Have Hit Trailer Park.   The local emergency management and National Weather Service personnel informally agreed to call the damage a tornado because there wasn't anything else, they thought, to call it. The problem was there was no "hook echo" (this was well before Doppler), the atmosphere over south central Kansas was not conductive to tornadoes, and no one saw a funnel cloud.  Just five months earlier, Dr. Ted Fujita and his mentor, Dr. Horace Byers, published their landmark paper in Monthly We...