Chuck's Blog

Ban on using the word “tornado”

Written by James Spann.

ON THIS DATE IN 1952: A: The ban on using the word “tornado” was
actually issued in 1886 and ended in 1952. In the 1880s John P. Finley
of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which then handled weather forecasting
for the USA, developed generalized forecasts on which days tornadoes
were most likely. But in 1886 the Army ended Finley’s program and
banned the word “tornado” from forecasts because “the harm done by a
(tornado) prediction would eventually be greater than that which
results form the tornado itself.” The thinking was that people would
be trampled in the panic if they heard a tornado was possible. The ban
stayed in place after the Weather Bureau, now the National Weather
Service, took over forecasting from the Army. A tornado that wrecked
52 large aircraft at Tinker Air Force Base, Okla., on March 20, 1948,
spurred Air Force meteorologists to begin working on ways to forecast
twisters. The Weather Bureau also began looking for ways to improve
tornado forecasts and established the Severe Local Storm Warning
Center, which is now the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. The
ban on the word “tornado” fell on March 17, 1952 when the new center
issued its first “tornado watch.”

James Spann
abc33/40 Birmingham, Alabama