Allen Pearson was the Director of the National Severe Storms Forecast Center from 1965–79 and began to collaborate with Tetsuya Theodore "Ted" Fujita on tornado physical characteristics soon after the 1970 Lubbock Tornado. They bounced ideas off each other and the Fujita scale (F-scale) and later the FPP scale was the result. Pearson had devised the computerized encoding of the tornado base, which included the F-P-P estimates. Pearson's major role was to get the cooperation of the NWS State Climatologists and to extend the computerized data base backwards to the 1950s.