Authors:

Lindsey Renee Peterson

Date Created:

Not specified

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About Paper:

On 3 April 1974, an outbreak of severe weather produced more than 100 tornadoes across 13 Midwest states, including Indiana. It featured seven F5 tornadoes, a record to this day, and would eventually be known as the 1974 Super Outbreak. In this presentation, we describe our efforts to digitally preserve first-hand accounts and records gathered by Purdue researchers from the 1974 Super Outbreak of tornadoes in Indiana. In the wake of the outbreak, Dr. Ernest Agee, a professor in the Geosciences Department (now EAPS) at Purdue University, started the Tornado Research Project (TRP). The goal of the TRP was to improve the understanding of the formation and movement of tornadoes. The research done on this event would explain the concept of tornado families: i.e., sequences of tornadoes produced by a single parent storm. Along with contemporaneous tornado research, this project laid the groundwork for modern tornado detection and warnings. The TRP materials included questionnaires completed by citizens who witnessed the event, personal photographs, and documents such as letters and newspaper articles. Currently, our team is in the process of safeguarding these pioneering efforts by digitizing the above materials, using best practices for digital archiving. Overall, our objective is to properly preserve the role that Purdue played in tornado research half a century ago. Keywords: Tornado; Digitization; Archive; Purdue; Indiana

Source:

Purdue University / 2024

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Lindsey Renee Peterson