TIME spoke with an Oklahoma meteorologist about tornado science, the likelihood of getting blown away, and the culture of storm chasing.
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Twisters.
It’s been nearly 30 years since Twister spiraled into theaters and changed the disaster movie game forever. Thanks to groundbreaking visual effects, palpable chemistry between leads Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, and the world’s enduring fascination with tornadoes, Jan De Bont’s 1996 blockbuster still holds up as a genre gem.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Now, Twisters, a spiritual sequel to the original from director Lee Isaac Chung (Minari), is gearing up for what’s expected to be a $55 million opening weekend. Starring Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kate and Glen Powell as Tyler, two rival Tornado Alley storm chasers who begin to realize their passions overlap in more ways than one, Twisters builds on its predecessor’s pitch for gathering data from inside a tornado by speculating on the possibility of “taming” one of the destructive funnel storms.
“In the original Twister, the idea of putting these Dorothy sensor balls into a tornado is completely science fiction, but it inspired a generation of people to want to do scientific research on storms,” Chung told the Hollywood Reporter. “And with this movie, the endeavor that Kate is on to see if she can disrupt the dynamics of a tornado, this is also based on a lot of science fiction. We’re just theorizing, and it’s definitely not something we want people to be doing, but we wanted the film to pay homage to science and research and conducting very big ideas out there.”
To try to figure out how realistic the plot of Twisters actually is, TIME spoke with Michael Seger, the chief meteorologist for 2News Oklahoma KJRH, about tornado science, the likelihood of getting blown away, and the culture surrounding storm chasing.
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Seger: From what we know right now, not very. That is the one part where they did kind of venture into science fiction. Everything else in the movie I thought was pretty much on point. That doesn’t mean in the future we won’t be able to tame a tornado in some way. But right now, that is more science fiction than actual science.
How a thunderstorm works, especially supercells, is you have your updraft—that’s where the air is rising up through the storm—and then you have your downdraft—that’s where all the precipitation is falling and you get hail. And what’s different about a supercell compared to your normal, pop-up summertime thunderstorm is that the updraft is tilted. So all the precipitation falls off to the side, but the updraft is able to sustain itself. That’s how it can maintain its organization for sometimes hours at a time, it doesn’t cut itself off. What drives a supercell is rising motion into the storm. It’s ingesting this warm and humid air. When you chase these storms, if you sit in the inflow region you can literally feel the storm sucking in air. You will have air rushing from behind you. With the strongest storms, the inflow can be sucked in at 50-60-plus miles per hour. It’s incredibly powerful at times. And so what they’re trying to do in the film is cut off the inflow. It’s like, hey, if we can get the updraft to precipitate, the air will start flowing down, cut off the updraft, and, therefore, kill the tornado.
Now, that could also cause repercussions and you may have just created an incredible microburst. If you have a 60,000-foot thunderstorm and all of a sudden the air starts collapsing and you get this massive downburst when that hits the ground, it’s going to spread out and you’re going to have a lot of wind and and then you have the outflow that could generate more storms downstream. So, in theory, you could try to do something like that, but right now, I just don’t think it’s possible. And they would have to do a lot more than just have a little trailer full [of polymers].
That’s definitely more Hollywood than real. They kind of do the same thing in the first Twister with Bill Paxton. I do a lot of storm chasing. And I always say there is an art to it. But we don’t really know why one storm will produce a tornado and another won’t. There are certain things we can look for—what environment is it in, are there other storms nearby that could interfere. But when it comes down to it, when you have Storm A and Storm B in what is seemingly an identical atmospheric environment and one goes on to produce a long track EF-4 tornado and another gets a tornado warning but doesn’t really do anything, we don’t really know why that is. There’s something else going on that we haven’t been able to figure out.
I think they got that premise from the TIV, the Tornado Intercept Vehicle, which was created by Sean Casey. He did the [Tornado Alley] IMAX film. But that was like a highly armored tank that would drive spikes into the ground and was designed to drop down to limit airflow underneath. If you were just out there in a normal vehicle, it would be battered. Stuff would be flying through the windows. So the screwing might help to keep the vehicle on the ground, but the debris is the most damaging part. It would probably be destroyed.
There are instances where the pattern will set up, and we will have multiple days of severe weather. So that absolutely can happen. It’s not something that happens very often, but it can.
There’s definitely a big culture of storm chasing. It’s hard to describe, but they tried to portray it in the movie. Like when they pull into the gas station and all the chasers are there, that is 100 percent on point. Because a lot of times on chase day, in the morning you try to pick a target area. Obviously you don’t know exactly where a storm is going to go, but you’ll circle say a 50-mile radius just to get an idea. And so what will happen is a lot of chasers will start to funnel to those locations and you usually just find a place to park and wait. That’s kind of the big thing with storm chasing that a lot of people don’t realize, it’s a lot of sitting and waiting. But a lot of the time you’re gathered with other chasers so there’s a bit of camaraderie there. The scenes where they’re battling on the road are definitely more Hollywood, but the gathering and everyone looking at data together is realistic.
I was so impressed with the computer graphics. They did so well modeling those tornadoes in the film. In the scenes where they’re driving through the storms, it looks incredibly close to the real thing. You could tell they worked with storm chasers and consulted with meteorologists to really get the motion right. They just did a fantastic job.
