(wind howling)
(glass shattering, house shaking)
♪ ♪
WOMAN: Sounded like a train, but I knew it wasn't.
And it just hit.
WOMAN 2: We were right underneath the front of it.
I've, I've never seen anything like it,
and I don't want to again.
WOMAN 3: Then I just said, "Lord, if it's time for me to go,
well, I, I have to say that it's my time to go."
NARRATOR: On April 3, 1974, scores of tornadoes
tore across 13 states in the center of the country,
leaving a massive path of destruction.
First responders in cities and rural areas
were overwhelmed.
MAN: We've got about 40 or 50 people injured this side of town.
GREGORY S. FORBES: There was tornado after tornado after tornado.
As the day unfolded, it became clear
that this was going to be an historic day.
NARRATOR: Hundreds died and thousands lay injured
from the Great Lakes Region to the Deep South.
The shock of the unprecedented outbreak
left Americans struggling to comprehend
what Mother Nature had wrought.
One scientist took on the challenge of understanding
what he would later call the "Super Outbreak."
Tetsuya Theodore Fujita,
a professor of meteorology at the University of Chicago,
was determined to make sense of the chaos.
NANCY MATHIS: He was a detective looking for clues,
and no detail should go unturned.
The Super Outbreak was one huge crime scene.
FUJITA: We do research on tornadoes.
And in case of future tornadoes, you know, what people should do,
that's the kind of thing we want to find out.
Right after the storm...
NARRATOR: The scene in America's heartland was all too familiar to Fujita.
Three decades earlier,
he had sought out answers amidst devastation
in Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
sifting through the rubble created
by the world's first atomic bombs.
MARK LEVINE: After the Second World War, he came to the U.S.
and he began a relentless pursuit
of studying the aftereffects of severely destructive forces.
NARRATOR: His unique forensic approach to meteorology was unorthodox,
and would transform the understanding
of one of nature's most powerful phenomena.
ROBERT F. ABBEY, JR.: Fujita was able to utilize
his insights, his ingenuity,
and give us knowledge about phenomenon
which we thought was unknowable.
♪ ♪
(waves crashing)
(air raid siren blaring)
NARRATOR: In the late morning of August 9, 1945,
in northern Kyushu, Japan,
a 24-year-old Tetsuya Fujita quickly led his students
toward an underground air raid bunker.
The young professor glanced at the sky,
but a thick layer of clouds obscured the aircraft,
a B-29 Superfortress laden with a single atomic bomb.
MATHIS: The primary target was three miles
from where Fujita was.
The bomber actually made three attempts to drop its load.
It could not get a visual because of the clouds,
so they ended up going to their secondary target,
which was Nagasaki.
The cloud cover over his city really spared his life.
(explosion echoes)
NARRATOR: At 11:02 a.m.,
the B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.
♪ ♪
Thousands of buildings and homes were instantly destroyed.
The flash radiation of heat from the blast
scorched hillsides as far as 8,000 feet away
from Ground Zero.
♪ ♪
(footsteps approaching)
FORBES: About a month later, Fujita was asked, as part of a team,
to go out and look at the damage pattern
around Nagasaki and Hiroshima
to see if they could determine
exact location of where the bomb detonated
and the altitude of the detonation.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: After closely examining the debris,
Fujita and his colleagues calculated
that the bomb had exploded 520 meters above the ground.
But what intrigued Fujita more
was the curious pattern left by the blast.
The blackened trees directly below the explosion
stood upright,
while those radiating out from Ground Zero
fell away horizontally in a starburst pattern.
As he studied the damage,
Fujita imagined the airflow from the blast
descending rapidly
and fanning outward upon contact with the ground,
toppling the trees.
ROGER WAKIMOTO: This was his first
really comprehensive damage survey.
It wasn't meteorological,
but some of his early understanding
of how to do a damage survey,
those seeds were planted during these surveys
of these two atomic bombs.
NARRATOR: In the ashes of Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
Fujita realized that the rubble told a story
beyond the tragedy of death and destruction.
♪ ♪
Tetsuya Fujita had always explored the natural world
with a fearless curiosity.
As a young boy in Japan,
he had studied astronomy to master tidal patterns
and avoid being stranded at sea while hunting for clams.
His father, a schoolteacher,
encouraged his inquisitive nature
despite his reckless behavior.
"I thought I could measure wind," Fujita recalled.
"When a typhoon came,
my father found I was standing on top of the roof."
LEVINE: Even as a child,
and even in a society as collectivist
as pre-war Japan,
he emphasizes his independent strain of mind.
Someone who wasn't willing to do things
the way the teachers expected him to do them,
but who might have known better.
NARRATOR: In 1939, at the age of 18,
Fujita departed from his boyhood home
for the Meiji College of Technology
to study engineering.
There, he continued to pursue his passion
for amateur meteorological experiments,
hopeful for a life filled with scientific research
in his beloved homeland.
But after the atomic bombs dropped on Japan,
everything changed for Fujita.
♪ ♪
MATHIS: After World War II ended,
Japan's economy was absolutely devastated.
He was an assistant professor,
but there was no research going on.
Just surviving was a struggle.
One of the things he did to get extra money was,
he applied and received a grant
to do science maps, weather maps,
for local schoolteachers.
NARRATOR: Working with atmospheric data
provided by local weather stations,
Fujita created detailed maps
that revealed something other scientists overlooked.
His maps provided far more information
about localized conditions
than the larger pressure fronts
illustrated as smooth curves in textbooks.
"In the 1940s and '50s,
people would smooth out those bumps and wiggles,"
a former student recalled.
"Fujita said, 'Those bumps and wiggles mean something.'"