COUNTING THE GRAINS OF SAND...

If someone were to ask you to document every single United States tornado of the past 150 years, you would likely raise your hands in despair. Such a task would seem analogous to counting grains of sand along the beach. Still, some researches have not only gathered the information- they wrote a book to prove it.

In the 1970's, a meteorologist named Tom Grazulis began researching historic tornadoes through a joint project with the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He led a project that would ultimately comb the archives of newspapers, film archives, and eye-witness reports from communities all over the United States. The project gained momentum, and was supplemented by a 5-year research grant by the National Science Foundation.

The end result was a massive, hardbound book containing over 50,000 tornado events. Despite the extremely small font size of the book, it still contained nearly 1,500 pages of information. Not just simply a list, the compilation (called simply "Significant Tornadoes")contained damage photos, storm statistics and meteorological analysis.

Of course, Grazulis' collection is not the only source of historic tornado information. NOAA's National Tornado Database is also a definitive source, as well as Ted Fujita's University of Chicago tornado research papers. Each of these sources provide fascinating reading, if you can find the time!