Tornado Author
Listen in RealAudio
Email your weather question

On a quiet, wooded farm near St. Johnsbury, Vermont, you’ll find the man who has studied more tornadoes than anyone else on earth.

A New England native Tom Grazulis lived through the region's worst-ever tornado, forty-eight years ago this coming weekend.

Lasting more than an hour, the massive twister in 1953 packed winds of more than 200 miles an hour. 100 people died because of it in Worcester, Massachusetts --unheard of for a New England tornado. Grazulis was eleven years old atthe time. He lived just south of the tornado's track and the destructive forced inspired his fascination with and vocation writing about twisters.

He looked for books on the topic but found only one book written for nonscientists: "Tornadoes of the United States," by Snowden Flora. This was the tornado book in many U.S. libraries from the 1950s to the 1970s.

In such a vacuum, Grazulis ended up writing his own book.

He spent years poring over newspapers and other records, and he put together a history of more than 10,000 U.S. tornadoes.

Now Grazulis has published another book, for a more general audience, titled "The Tornado." It's actually an update of that little gray book from the fifties. It tells all about advances like mobile Doppler radar and the Fujita scale, but it also looks at amazing tornado stories Grazulis read about as a kid, from chickens losing their feathers to frozen fish that fall from the sky. Some of these are clearly myths, according to Grazulis, but we still have much to learn. Right now we're in the middle of what he calls "a golden age of tornado research."

Thanks today to writer Bob Henson of Boulder, Colorado. The Weather Notebook is a propduction of the Mount Washington Observatory and supported by Subaru.