The incredible reality of being a storm chaser: ‘The centre of the tornado went over me’

Twisters shows the life of professional storm chasers to be one of almost constant danger. Is it realistic – or just Hollywood exaggeration?

Twisters has hit cinemas, whipping up $123m in box-office sales globally over the weekend. The film stars Daisy Edgar-Jones as a meteorologist and Glen Powell as a storm-chasing social-media superstar who find themselves in the middle of terrifying, all-powerful tornadoes.

About 800 tornadoes hit the US every year, many in the Central Great Plains of Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma, where the film is set.

Trailing them are real-life chasers – thrill-seekers, content creators, and social-media types – as well as media professionals reporting the latest developments and scientists who track and study tornadoes in the race to produce better, more precise extreme weather warnings. Tornadoes leave death and destruction in their wake. According to the US National Weather Service, about 80 people are killed and 1500 injured by tornadoes every year, causing annual damage of up to US$700 million.

So who are these real-life storm chasers? How realistic are their portrayals on the big screen? And what’s it like in the eye of the tornado?

Brandon Clement, 44, is an Emmy-winning videographer who films extreme weather via his company WXChasing. He captures footage for breaking news reports in the US and around the world.

Clement’s job has placed him in serious danger. Once, a semi-truck flipped on top of his car when the truck drove into a tornado. Both Clement and the truck driver climbed out unscathed. “I was sore,” he says, a friendly, thickset figure with a Louisiana accent. “But there were no major injuries.”

Most terrifying was El Reno, the widest tornado ever recorded, which tore through Oklahoma in May 2013 at 4.2km wide with wind speeds of more than 482km/h, killing three storm chasers.

Clement says he took a “direct hit” as El Reno was forming. He found himself driving in the outskirts of the tornado for almost a minute and had to keep the nose of his car with the wind. If the car had been hit side on, it would have rolled. He pulled over to safety. “The centre of the tornado went over me,” he says.

It sounds like a scene from Twister, the 1996 blockbuster starring Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton (this year’s Twisters is a sort-of sequel). Clement rolls his eyes at the mention of the original movie. He thinks it portrays storm-chasing as a cash-in – as if storm chasers do it only for money. He says making a living is tough.

It’s hard work, he says. “Everyone sees the two or three-minute videos of a tornado. What they don’t see are the months of forecasting and driving and sleeping in cars and crappy hotels and eating bad food and giving up everything else in your life to get those two or three minutes of footage.”

Clement’s weather expertise is self-taught. He started chasing storms nearly 30 years ago and began filming them as a means of earning a living from what had been, until he picked up a camera, an expensive hobby.

A scene from the 1996 film, Twister. Photo / Warner Bros

How did his fascination begin? Clement remembers being captivated by a tropical storm at 5 years old in Louisiana, where he grew up. He recalls another incident at college in Mississippi.

“I was in class and we had a tornado warning,” he recalls. “I went right out of the class – everyone was yelling at me to stop. I got in my car and chased that storm for almost 60 miles and it produced a tornado. I just fell in love with it there.”

He says he loves chaos. “I enjoy it when mother nature is showing out.”

In the original Twister, Paxton and Hunt play meteorologists who chase tornadoes with a “Dorothy” device – a cylinder filled with satellite-like weather sensors, which they must deploy into the funnel of a tornado.

If they succeed, Dorothy will help give storm warnings earlier. But it’s a race against a rival storm chaser, the brilliantly smarmy Cary Elwes, who builds his own version of Dorothy.

Joshua Wurman, 63, is among their real-life scientific counterparts, one of the world’s leading tornado researchers – akin to Daisy Edgar-Jones’s character in the new film. He maps them in order to create earlier, more precise warnings, intended to give people more time to reach safety. Wurman leads the Center for Severe Weather Research based in Boulder, Colorado, and is a regular expert on Storm Chasers, the Discovery Channel reality series.

But Wurman resists the “storm chaser” label himself. “We’re chasing storms but we’re doing it for a scientific purpose, as opposed to… people who are doing it for recreation,” he says.

“I don’t really like to chase. But I do it because it’s necessary to discover the things I want to know. The details of how tornadoes form are still a very big mystery.”

Wurman began his career studying physics and meteorology at MIT in the early 1980s and earned his PhD in meteorology in 1991. Four years later he invented the Doppler on Wheels (DOW), a truck-mounted weather radar, which produced the first three-dimensional mapping of tornadic winds.

A Doppler on Wheels in action. Photo / Getty Images

He has been out with DOWs every tornado season – which typically runs from March to June in the US – since. The idea is to get in front of the tornado, park the radars in strategic spots then deploy pods, which Wurman describes as “rugged weather stations” – a real-life version of the mini sensors that the Twister crew release into tornadoes. “We kind of make a net in front of it,” he says, “and try to catch it as it comes through.”

“We can take two and three-dimensional maps of what winds are doing in the tornado and near the tornado. We can see how strong the winds are. We can see if they’re getting stronger or weaker. We can see how big the tornado is. Some tornadoes have mini tornadoes inside them. We can see a lot of details like that.”

Unlike the disaster movies, in which storm chasers race through dusty plains in high-speed vehicles, Wurman says the real-life work can be boring.

“I have no selfies in front of tornadoes,” he says. Wurman is so busy in the truck studying radar that he rarely sees them for real.

Scientists know the general conditions conducive to tornadoes forming. They need energy, for instance. “Warm moist days where you get bubbling thunderstorms,” he says. They can generally forecast the areas in which storms are most likely to form tornadoes. What they don’t know is which of those storms will form into tornadoes and why. “We have a very hard time distinguishing that,” he says.

Wurman does not object to how his profession is portrayed on the big screen. “I don’t have the expectation that a Hollywood movie is going to accurately describe everything with a lot of detail, but they were approximately right.”

According to Variety, a deleted final scene in Twisters in which Powell and Edgar-Jones shared a passionate kiss didn’t make it into the movie on the advice of executive producer Steven Spielberg, because it risked the plot descending into cliché.

In the original Twister, the romance between Paxton and Hunt’s characters is “probably the most unrealistic part” of that film, says Wurman. “We’re a bunch of nerds.”

Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell in Twisters. Photo / Universal Pictures

Wurman points out that more people are killed by car accidents in the US than tornadoes. But there’s also a psychological aspect to producing better warnings. “Tornadoes cause fear due to their apparent arbitrariness,” he says. “There is a concept of dread risk, what people fear, and reducing the fear from those risks helps people live better lives.”

With Twisters in cinemas, Clement expects a surge in interest in storm chasing – and he expects to answer a lot more questions about how realistic the films are.

The sequel has taken almost 30 years to arrive, but there’s no such respite for the professionals. Both Clement and Wurman are now looking towards the next hurricane season.

Already this month, Clement has been on the island of Carriacou in Grenada at the centre of Hurricane Beryl, where he helped the prime minister set up communications after the island was devastated. One thing about life as a storm chaser: there’s no waiting for the storm to come to you.