Friday, August 09, 2013

"how excellent is thy name" - Nagasaki and Downburst




National Diet (Parliament) Bldg., Tokyo


Nagasaki and Downburst

Two minutes past 11 o'clock on August 9, 1945 a nuclear bomb was blasted over Nagasaki City, Japan, as it was released down from a B29 bomber of the US Air Force.

Then on August 15 the Empire of Japan surrendered to the US and other allied nations.  The Second World War ended for Japan.

Tow weeks after the end of WWII, a university in Fukuoka Prefecture, northeast of Nagasaki, sent an investigation team to Nagasaki.  They studied how the atomic bomb destroyed the port city in a scientific manner.  Among the scientists of the team was assistant professor Tetsuya Fujita (1920-1998), a resident of Kokura Area, Fukuoka.  Fujita took pictures of the devastated state of the City, though taking pictures was forbidden by the Imperial authority.

Recently those pictures young scientist Fujita secretly took in Nagasaki were rediscovered in a house of a Fujita's relative who lives in Fukuoka.  There were 33 pictures vividly showing vastly damaged streets and buildings of Nagasaki City.  Some of them were apparently focused on trees, power poles and facilities to provide electricity for tram cars.  Trees at the ground zero however stood strangely while other trees around and far from the center of explosion were all knocked down.  Iron poles and structures for a municipal electric railway were violently twisted in some pattern.  They told how  bomb blasts attacked those objects on the ground while the nuclear bomb blew up 500 meters (1500 feet) above the ground.

In 1953 Tetsuya Fujita took a doctorate in the University of Tokyo and was subsequently invited to the University of Chicago.  Living in the US, he later contributed greatly to science in his study in meteorology, especially, specializing in tornadoes.

In 1975 Fujita joined an investigation team of an air accident at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York.  Then he became the first scientist that discovered a special air phenomenon which he named "downburst."

Today, parties concerned used the index called the Fujita scale to express the strength of a tornado.

Nonetheless if weather conditions over Kokura Area had been suitable for bombing on August 9, 1945, the B29 should have attacked Kokura with the nuclear bomb instead of Nagasaki according to priority order, since both Kokura and Nagasaki are on Kyusyu Island.  Then Tetsuya Fujita must have been killed so unfortunately.

Fujita is recognized as the discoverer of downbursts and microbursts and also developed the Fujita scale, which differentiates tornado intensity and links tornado damage with wind speed. 
Residing in Kokura, the primary target of the Fat Man bomb, during the war he was spared by cloudy weather forcing the bombers to move on to the secondary target at Nagasaki. Studying the damage caused by the nuclear blasts led to his understanding of downbursts and microbursts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Fujita




Nagasaki after the Atomic Bomb Attack by US Army
http://www.page.sannet.ne.jp/mhvmhv/NagasakiAtomicBombDisaster.html



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Psa 8:9 O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!