March 17, 1952 – The ban on using the word “tornado” was ended. The ban had been in place since 1886.
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 from 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.”
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