Some weather events were not just impactful – they also served as the instigator for significant leaps forward in the field of meteorology.
June 20, 1957, 68 years ago, was one of those days. That evening, a tornado carved a nine-mile path through Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota.
Ten people were killed and another 103 were injured, but it could have been much worse. Timely warnings issued by the National Weather Service and broadcast over local TV and radio allowed residents to seek safe shelter.
The Fargo tornado was one of the most heavily photographed twisters at the time. That caught the attention of the father of tornado science, Theodore Fujita.
Fujita conducted a comprehensive study of this event and found, among other things, that one supercell thunderstorm spawned five separate tornadoes across eastern North Dakota and northwest Minnesota that afternoon, a term he coined “tornado families.”
He also documented the entire life cycle of the Fargo tornado and introduced the term “wall cloud” for the compact, lowered cloud in supercell thunderstorms that can, but not always, precede a tornado.
Fourteen years after the Fargo tornado, Fujita rolled out the Fujita scale – replaced by the Enhanced Fujita (EF) scale in 2007 – to estimate a tornado’s winds by the damage it produces. He then rated the Fargo tornado an F5, the highest level on the scale.
That remains one of only two F5s (or EF5s) on record in North Dakota, including a May 29, 1953, twister in Ft. Rice.
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
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