Thomas P. Grazulis
| Tom Grazulis | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 17, 1942 Worcester, Massachusetts, USA |
| Residence | St. Johnsbury, Vermont, USA |
| Fields | Meteorology |
| Institutions | The Tornado Project |
| Alma mater | Florida State University |
| Known for | tornado history, statistical, and climatology research |
| Influences | Snowden D. Flora, David M. Ludlum, Ted Fujita |
Thomas P. Grazulis (born August 17, 1942) is a meteorologist who has written extensively about tornadoes and is head of the Tornado Project.
Thomas Grazulis grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts and first confronted the power of a tornado at age 11 following the violent 1953 Worcester tornado, an F4 which killed 94 people and passed approximately 1 mi (1.6 km) north of his childhood home.
Grazulis earned a bachelor's degree in meteorology from Florida State University (FSU) and was briefly a broadcaster, in part presenting the weather. He was a science teacher in New Jersey and worked on the "Earth Science Curriculum Project" with the National Science Foundation (NSF). He and his wife Doris, also a teacher and a small business operator, then moved to the St. Johnsbury, Vermont area in 1970. In 1972, he and Doris released Approaching the Unapproachable, a documentary film on tornadoes that was the first to consider tornadoes in a scientific context rather than as a hazard.
In 1979 Grazulis began working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in creating a history of tornadoes. Specifically, he worked on refining and augmenting the databases of tornadoes maintained by the National Severe Storms Forecast Center (NSSFC) in Kansas City, Missouri as well as the database headed by Ted Fujita. The objective was to determine tornado occurrence and intensity distributions, i.e. tornado climatology, for risk assessment studies. Grazulis' tornado database work was considered important enough that it was followed by five years of funding from the National Science Foundation.
In the process Grazulis traveled the country visiting dozens of libraries, museums, university archives, historical societies, and the like, to eventually chronicle 60,000 tornadoes, 50,000 of them included in a single 1,400 page book. He is estimated to have read 25,000 microfilm reels of mostly major newspapers. His work concentrated in state libraries and the U.S. Library of Congress but also included local libraries when pertinent. The first book (which was two volumes), results from the NRC funded work, was Significant Tornadoes, 1880-1989. Sales of the book filled a gap in tornado information and strong sales led to an expansion, Significant Tornadoes, 1680-1991. In turn, sales of this book and of Tornado Project videos and posters were robust enough that an update was published for the years 1992-1995. Significant Tornadoes contains 51 photographs of tornadoes prior to 1970, the most extensive collection published. Grazulis amassed one of three authoritative tornado databases, those being the National Tornado Database assembled and maintained by NOAA agencies, the University of Chicago DAPPL database founded by Fujita which ended at his retirement in 1992, and the Grazulis Tornado Project database. As of 2014, the Grazulis database spans from 1680-1995 and includes all known significant tornadoes (those rated F2-F5 or causing a fatality).
...
Wikipedia