Tornado science has come a long way in 30 years.

while Twister and Twister, Tornado science has come a long way in 30 years

By Max Springer

“Dorothy” is a classic disaster movie from almost 30 years ago, in which she is intentionally thrown into an F5 tornado in Oklahoma. TwisterThe film follows storm-tracking scientists as they use their special equipment – a weather station with hundreds of sensors – to measure the current state of the weather. The Wizard of Oz), developed to understand the mechanisms behind one of the most frightening phenomena in nature, has now had its sequel released. Twister, We follow another group of storm chasers who use modern technology and knowledge to actually destroy and dissipate these monster phenomena.

Comparing the two films shows how much tornado science has changed since the first film, which featured now-outdated radar and computer technology.Twister“This is everything to our lives,” says Elizabeth Smith, a research meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory. And many of these advances have come about through what she calls “an ensemble of incremental changes,” not through a single project like the one depicted in the first film. The advances since then have turned fiction into reality over the decades, and allowed the latest film to explore even greater possibilities in managing and responding to dangerous weather events.

In the 1996 original, Helen Hunt’s character, Joe Harding, wanted to obtain data from inside funnel clouds to better understand how tornadoes work, and to extend tornado warnings from three to 15 minutes. Now, decades later, this sci-fi dream has become a reality. “Today, when we give a warning, it takes, on average, 15 minutes,” says Harold Brooks, senior research scientist at NSSL. While that may seem like a small extension in the grand scheme of things, it could significantly extend the time it takes people to reach shelter.

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The improvements are down to a variety of new technologies, including more detailed radar measurements and more powerful computers, but Smith said the most important advances are computer models that can describe storms in far greater detail and process observations much more quickly and accurately, improving the accuracy of storm forecasts.

Early modeling work focused on building digital renderings of storms from observed data, similar to the Dorothy mission. But today’s tornado simulations are actually showing aspects of tornado structure that have never been observed before in a variety of simulations. Storm chasers then verified these phenomena in the field. “Instead of going out and trying to sample something to represent it in a model, now the opposite is happening,” Smith says. “It’s a big paradigm shift.”

Modern forecast models can predict an approaching tornado more than an hour in advance. But this long warning time isn’t always helpful. “When people are warned one or two hours in advance, they tend to prioritize other activities over their immediate safety, which is not the reaction we want,” says Shawn Waugh, a research scientist at the NSSL. A 2011 study found that public surveys preferred a warning time of about 30 minutes, which balanced urgency with enough lead time to get to safety.

This improved computer modeling allows the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center, which issues tornado watches and warnings, to pinpoint where a tornado will strike, instead of issuing previous countywide warnings that often reached people far away from the danger. By reducing false alarms with more accurate warnings, these innovations help keep the public vigilant. And now forecasters are experimenting with advanced computer techniques, like machine learning, to analyze vast amounts of data more quickly and accurately to further improve the timeliness and accuracy of warnings.

Observational tornado research is also shifting toward studying the three-dimensional structure of storms on a larger scale. Key technologies such as lidar (light detection and ranging) have become essential. These tools allow researchers to map the ever-changing, complex structure of the large storms that produce tornadoes, and understand why similar environmental conditions produce tornadoes in one storm but not another nearby. This complexity highlights the limitations of collecting individual data points within a storm (an approach that was dramatically illustrated in the 2000s). Twister “There’s so much going on in such a small space that you need to see it all at once to understand what’s going on,” Waugh said.

Beyond the goal of improving warnings, scientists in the new film explore the possibility of disrupting tornadoes. But in reality, the science behind such a feat is still out of reach. The concept of intentionally neutralizing a tornado is theoretically possible, Brooks says, but the energy contained in a tornado is enormous, and disrupting an actual tornado would require an energy input on a scale that is both physically and practically impossible to achieve. “In terms of energy, a tornado releases roughly the equivalent of an atomic bomb every second, and a thunderstorm can release the energy of dozens of hydrogen bombs every second,” Brooks says.

Even if humans could somehow quell an oncoming tornado, the atmospheric conditions that generated the storm would persist, and another one could soon form. Relatively speaking, “the tornado is just a scorching fart in the storm,” Brooks says. Waugh says that while neutralizing tornadoes is an appealing idea, ultimately, “we can’t play God to these natural phenomena. Instead, we should focus on making people more resilient and better protected in the face of these events.”

While the science in the new film is unrealistic in some ways, the very real and astounding technological and scientific achievements of modern weather science would have seemed like science fiction to Jo Harding and her team. And those advances aren’t just important to weather science and Hollywood spectacle – they’ve saved countless lives. “This work impacts everyday life,” Smith says. “It keeps us grounded.”