The ultimate goal is another megabook, Hurricanes of the Caribbean and North America , which will span the period from 1500 to the present. He hopes to include rainfall and tornado distribution maps for every tropical cyclone that made landfall in the United States in the 20th century. In between it all, Grazulis is preparing TVC IV , delving into lightning projects, expanding his U.S. tornado data bank to include Canada, and spinning off an update of the Snowden Flora book Tornadoes of the United States , to be released next year by the University of Oklahoma Press. I'm sick of telling people that I've never seen one. The Grazulises recently hired their neighbor, Wanda Parrish, and Matt Biddle, a graduate student and chaser in Oklahoma, as the project's first two official employees.
Time remains a rare commodity, though.
Yet the Grazulises say they are pulled as much as pushed by the immensity of their undertakings. We immerse ourselves in an idea and we have a good time doing it. Twister opens with a flashback from 1969, in which the young heroine Jo Harding's father yells that the TV weathercaster is tracking an F5 tornado. Actually, it wasn't until 1971 that the University of Chicago's Ted Fujita crafted his now-legendary Fujita tornado intensity scale. It uses observed damage patterns to rank tornadoes and estimate their wind speeds.