The immensely popular 1996 movie Twister was riddled with scientific missteps, something Sean Waugh, a researcher with the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and and his fellow scientists were determined to help the sequel Twister” avoid. Photo / Reto Sterchi, The New York Times
The original Twister ushered in a new era of fascination with tornadoes. Its follow-up may have even bigger ambitions.
Sean Waugh holds a laptop with green, red and yellow weather radar looping as his driver rumbles down an Oklahoma highway in their government-issued truck. The vehicle holds 190 litres of fuel, so they can chase storms all day. A rectangular cage with metal mesh covers the truck in an attempt to protect the team from hail. Hanging off the front of the hail cage are weather instruments that look like the horn of a rhinoceros charging into a storm.
The truck, called Probe One, points in one direction, and a companion, Probe Two, points in another. Tall grass flows like ocean waves, and the stop sign at a crossroads wobbles. The sky is dark grey with a hint of green. Lightning flashes on all sides.
The radio cracks. “Probe One, you want us to go?”
“Yes, go now,” says Waugh, a researcher with the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
As they disappear into the mist, another storm chaser emerges: Reed Timmer, who has a large social media following, pulls in front in one of his tank-like trucks, called the Dominator.
It’s just the scientist, the YouTube star and a lonely farmhouse.
Waugh breaks the silence, “Tornado, tornado right in front of us. See it?”
There it is, a faint grey swirl, like a twirling ballerina, emerging from the curtain of rain for a few fleeting seconds. The Dominator’s roar can be heard over the thunder as it takes off down a muddy dirt road. A satellite tornado – one that forms outside the central circulation – is 100 yards away.
With a little dramatisation and some special effects, it could be a scene in the new film Twisters. The movie is a follow-up to Twister, which holds a special spot in Waugh’s heart – as it does for many who study tornadoes. The release of Twister in 1996 spawned a new era of storm chasing, turning what used to be a lonely scientific pursuit into something occasionally resembling a circus, drawing not just researchers but also livestreamers, storm spotters, tour vans and anyone who buys a $10 radar app to take them where the action is.
For all its impact, though, Twister was riddled with scientific missteps, something Waugh and his fellow scientists were determined to help Twisters avoid.
Kevin Kelleher, a semi-retired researcher who was a part-time consultant on the original and spent two years consulting on Twisters, said the filmmakers, including executive producers Steven Spielberg and Ashley Jay Sandberg and director Lee Isaac Chung “were all very interested in having basic science correct.”
Have they succeeded?
The premise of Twisters is an effort to disrupt or kill a tornado – tame it, as one of the main characters, Kate Conner, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, says. Doing so for real would be “quite a leap,” according to Kelleher, but one that could, in theory, be possible.
The film’s characters go about this by shooting chemicals into a storm, which absorb and cool the water the tornado is using for fuel, trying to stop it before it hits a crowded movie theatre. Waugh sees nature choking itself out with cold air like this all the time. But the idea of humans directly causing it to happen is, for now, a Hollywood invention.
It’s largely a scale problem.
According to Waugh, Kelleher and scientists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory sat down and did some back-of-the-envelope calculations. “They were, like, OK, if you could launch a chemical into the storm, that would basically cause enough precipitation to force a downdraft that was cold enough to kill the tornado. How much would it take?”
They did the math and came up with a number. And that’s sort of what led to the movie’s driving plot: getting enough of this chemical.
In real life, up to 30 tonnes of material would be needed to cause any meaningful change in an environment as powerful as a tornado. “It’s physically not possible,” Waugh said. And even if it were, Kelleher said, it would take 15 to 20 minutes for the chemicals to absorb and the rains to coagulate.
In the Hollywood version, the scientists pack the chemicals into a tiny trailer. And when it’s shot into the storm, the effect is seen in a matter of seconds. But the creative liberties don’t bother Kelleher. “It’s not a documentary,” he said. “It’s for fun.”
“Just like the first one,” Kelleher said. “I anticipate there’ll be folks who want to challenge the storyline, and that’s fine, but I don’t think anybody’s standing up and saying, this is 100% how the world works.”
During a storm, Waugh stands tall, like a general in the middle of a battle. Despite the chaos, nothing seems to make him flinch. Calmly, but hurriedly, with his long gait, he takes a few steps toward the truck and says it’s time to go.
“It’s going to go, literally, like a half-mile to a mile down the road,” he said. “I guarantee you it’s in there.”
Unlike in the movie, Waugh is not driving straight into a tornado. Instead, riding in Probe One, he moves west in front of the tornado while Probe Two drives east. They each hold their location as the tornado passes between them and then drive back across behind it as it swirls past them. The manoeuver leaves Probe One in the most precarious spot – between the tornado and the dangerous wind, hail and rain of the downdraft.
The trucks are part of a larger research group called Lift, which stands for low-level internal flows in tornadoes. The team, consisting of national storm lab scientists and academics from schools such as Texas Tech, is trying to collect information from the damage layer of tornadoes (the lowest 20 metres near the ground), a region where it has not routinely been collected.
The work isn’t dissimilar to what the film’s fictional team is doing. In the movie, three trucks that look very similar to Probe One and Probe Two are nicknamed Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow. They’re trying to drop portable phased radar close to the tornado, triangulate around it, and recover data from the three-dimensional winds occurring.
The trucks for the film’s storm chasers are essentially the same setup the real-life scientists use. That’s because Waugh built them in his garage. “I don’t mean, like, I told them how to build them – I actually built the equipment for the movie,” he said. (Waugh makes a cameo in Twisters, lumbering around in the background at a gas station in one scene.)
In real life, as in the movie, it can be difficult to time and execute every person and instrument around a storm. And despite having more nimble mobile radars and lidar, they still can’t be deployed off the back of a truck and left on the ground close to the path of a tornado like in the movie. But maybe someday.
“We’re going to see that technology kind of move away from science fiction and into more of a reality space where we might be able to pull that kind of thing off,” Waugh said.
Using slightly different (and larger) technology, the nonfiction team is essentially trying to answer the same question that both movies have yet to solve: How does a tornado form?
Like Twisters, Twister was based on real research but stretched the bounds of technology. In that first movie, scientists had a plan to send sensors into a tornado to obtain readings and, hopefully, collect enough data to predict when a tornado would form and how it would behave.
But it’s still not something scientists can actually do, nearly three decades later.
“Just point blank, the technology is not there,” Waugh said. “It’s not small enough. You can’t make it light enough to fly like that.” But like other elements of the films, Kelleher and Waugh believe the sensors could be made in theory, though they question if the expense would be worthwhile. The real future, they say, is getting radars closer to the base of a tornado to create a 3D representation.
Since Twister, scientists have gained a fair understanding of how the rotation of a tornado starts and its basic ingredients. Because of this, warning times have steadily improved. The more is understood about how a tornado forms, the earlier and more accurate the warnings can be.
“You hear the first movie, and you hear this movie saying, ‘What we’re doing could save lives,’ or, ‘What we’re doing can make a difference,’” said Rick Smith, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma. (He’s also an extra in the movie, playing a service employee, and he taught a meteorology lesson to the actors.)
“And it’s true. I mean, it’s absolutely true with this tornado research.”
Every meteorologist working on Twisters has asked themselves a deeper question: Even if we could tame a tornado, should we?
“Weather modification is a really tricky business because we don’t know what the outcomes of it would be,” Waugh said.
Every bit of weather, every cloud, every tornado, hurricane, flash flood, all of it, he said, is a balancing act by the planet trying to alleviate energy imbalances between the poles and the equator. If that process is interfered with, what will happen? Because that energy will go somewhere. And it may not be pretty when it does.
“Tornadoes happen for a reason. Thunderstorms happen for a reason,” Smith said. “It’s like Jurassic Park – you start messing around with the way nature is supposed to work, then what?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Judson Jones
Photographs by: Reto Sterchi
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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