Catch the wind ... at 200 m.p.h.

In our Inquirer article we noted that the tragic death of paratrooper Malvin L. Brown, on the same day that an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, was tied to one of the great discoveries in the history of meteorology.

Given space limitations we could give only a drive-by reference to Wasaburo Ooishi, the brilliant researcher who discovered the upper-air jet-stream winds that make and move storms across the planet.

The Japanese used them to launch the world's first inter-continental ballistic missiles – in this case bomb-carrying balloons.

The Japanese were hoping to set the Pacific Northwest woods aflame, and that's how Malvin Brown and about 300 other African-American U.S. paratroopers, ended up in Oregon.

The bombs weren't Ooishi's idea, nor was the fact that the rest of the world knew nothing about the high-speed winds that can howl up to 200 m.p.h. and greater.

The winds would ambush Allied bombers during World War II, when planes were reaching jet-stream heights for the first time, consuming their fuel and making the bombs miss targets.

But Ooishi had made his discovery in the 1920s. He made no secret of it, publishing his findings in Esperanto, the universal scientific language.. But they were ignored.

A few years back a Japanese meteorological official was kind enough to pass along a paper about Ooishi's work, and a wonderful essay from his granddaughter.

We are grateful to Inquirer photographer Akira Suwa, fluent in Japanese and English, who was our translator.

We learned that Ooshi's work was commissioned after a horrific marine accident in 1910 that killed 65 people aboard fishing boats during a storm.

As a result, a weather-savvy member of the Japanese parliament, Sho Nemoto, who had studied in the United States, demanded that the nation's scientific community learn more about the upper atmosphere.

Ooishi became the first director of the Aerological Observatory, at Tateno, in 1920.  Using pilot balloons he made 1,228 observations from March 1923 to February 1925, becoming the first scientist to document the high-speed winds that today appear routinely in TV weather graphics.

His granddaughter recalled him as a gentle man who treasured his chestnut trees and cultivated morning glories on the observatory grounds.

We feel on safe ground in stating that Ooishi never envisioned that the winds would become highways of war.

Ironically, while the balloon-bombing campaign was a dud, one of them did land near the Hanford nuclear facility, in southeastern Washington, causing a power outage at the plant where work on the Manhattan Project was underway.

The horrific destruction in Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945 affirms that the Manhattan Project survived the outage.