The Fujita Scale

The forum that wrote the replacement scale was convened by Texas Tech's Wind Science and Engineering Center in March 2001, and the National Weather Service put the Enhanced Fujita scale fully into use on February 1, 2007. Instead of a single description per category, it rates a tornado against 28 damage indicators, such as building types and trees, each with eight degrees of damage. Its EF0 begins at 65 mph and EF5 at more than 200, lower than the original scale's F5 of 262 to 317 mph. Ratings made under the old scale still stand.

What the plaque says

The Fujita Scale is a tool used to estimate wind speed by looking at the damage tornadoes cause. It was developed by Dr. Tetsuya Theodore (Ted) Fujita (1920-1998), who began studying tornadoes and thunderstorms in the late 1940s at the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan and later at the University of Chicago. While Dr. Fujita visited more than 300 sites from 1965 to 1991, the 1970 Lubbock tornado was significant in confirming his data. Shortly after his visit, he published the Fujita Scale. A combination of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale and the Mach Number Scale, categories on the scale determined wind speed as seen by the damage left behind. F0 tornadoes were described as 'light damage' while F5 tornadoes were 'incredible damage,' as confirmed by the May 11, 1970, Lubbock Tornado. Shortly after its introduction, the National Weather Service and the meteorology community adopted the Fujita Scale as a means of describing tornadoes after the fact. Although the Fujita Scale was widely used, it had limitations. The scale did not take structural integrity into account and damage could be misleading. In 2000, researchers from Texas Tech University's Institute for Disaster Research began to study ways to improve the Fujita Scale. In 2006, the researchers submitted their findings to the National Weather Service. The result was the Enhanced Fujita Scale, adopted on February 1, 2007. The new scale added metrics for the quality of construction and economic impact from damages. Other countries have adopted the Enhanced Fujita Scale or modified versions of the original. It continues to be a valuable tool for identifying safer construction methods and materials, as well as planning for severe weather events. (2020)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Buddy Holly Center — 1.0 mi
  The city's museum of Buddy Holly and West Texas music in a 1928 railway depot, with the house where the Crickets worked on That'll Be the Day moved next door.
• National Ranching Heritage Center — 1.7 mi
  A Texas Tech outdoor museum where ranch houses, barns, windmills and a depot from across the ranching country were moved one by one onto a single park beside the campus.
• American Windmill Museum — 1.9 mi
  Lubbock's park of restored water-pumping windmills and early wind chargers, more than 70 of them turning outdoors and the rare ones under roof, with a megawatt-era turbine overhead.
• Lubbock Lake Landmark — 3.1 mi
  A bend of Yellow House Draw on Lubbock's north edge where digging has found nearly 12,000 years of people on the Southern High Plains, layer on layer, from Clovis to the 1880s.

More markers nearby

• The 1970 Lubbock Tornado — steps away
• Congressman George Mahon — 0.3 mi
• First Methodist Church of Lubbock — 0.4 mi
• Lubbock County — 0.6 mi