If you’re looking for a cinematic rollercoaster ride, look no further than Twisters. The funny and lovable characters, breakneck plot, and perhaps the best special effects so far in 2024 made the Twister sequel an inevitable box office success. But the story is at its heart about science and scientists. So for those of us who may be more sensitive to meteorological truths — did the filmmakers, in making their blockbuster, compromise on the science?
The short answer: No! Sure, a very central piece of the film concerning stopping a tornado in its tracks is more fiction than fact. But after we spoke with two tornado experts — then waited a few days for them to see the film and checked back in — we were pleasantly surprised. In five meaningful ways, Twisters stuck the landing.
Fact #1: A tornado outbreak could very well last 36 hours in the same place.
In the movie, we see tornadoes emerging over consecutive days. This, it turns out, can happen — though Twisters does exaggerate.
“While it is possible to have multiple consecutive active severe weather days in a location or region, it would be unprecedented for it to be as extreme as suggested in the movie,” Cameron Homeyer, interim director of the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, tells Inverse.
On May 4 and 5, 2007, southwest Kansas experienced a multi-day tornado outbreak. Robin Tanamachi, associate professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University, tells Inverse that the first day featured at least three powerful tornadoes, rated at Enhanced-Fujita 3 (EF3) or higher. But tornado strength wanes, usually, with time. “The tornadoes on the second day were much less intense than those on the first,” Tanamachi says.
Fact #2: The “cap” is a tornado-halting phenomenon.
A unique force, known as a “cap,” can indeed halt tornado formation, working like the lid atop a pot of boiling water. Twisters gets this right.
“Yes, the ‘cap’ was described well in the movie,” Homeyer says. “Beyond this, I was generally impressed with the level of scientific jargon they managed to work into the dialogue that was reasonable – much better than the first film in my opinion!”
Thunderstorms and tornadoes gain fuel when warm air ascends in a strong updraft. The “cap” shuts down this process, because it is a stable layer of air in the lower atmosphere that is resistant to displacement. But when an air front pushes into the environment, or when a thermal plume punches up through the stable air, the otherwise impenetrable wall gives way.
The new sustained updraft performs “like a vacuum cleaner,” Tanamachi says.
Fact #3: You can predict a tornado by the clouds.
This is one thing we can all — and if we live in a tornado-prone area, we probably should — learn how to do for free, through the National Weather Service.
Tornado clouds are special. For one, they’re massive. Known as supercells, they have unique features. Expert storm spotters interpret a variety of these details.
The most important one is located below the supercell’s wide top. It’s a rotating cloud feature that extends below the cloud’s broader base. This is a wall cloud.
The wall cloud remains persistent below the base of a storm, Homeyer says. When the whole wall cloud begins to rotate, “that’s probably the best visible indication that we have that the likelihood of a tornado is higher than it otherwise would be in that storm.”
Fact #4: Storm chasers do good research — and sometimes get wild.
“Back in 1996, there was a huge upswing in the number of, you know, students who came to college looking to major in meteorology because they wanted to do storm chasing,” Tanamachi says. Homeyer thinks Twisters will have a similar impact.
As shown in the new movie, making an income from storm chasing is hard. “Chasing generally is not a viable career track,” Tanamachi says. She chases in the field a few weeks out of the year for work. The rest of the time, she analyzes data, teaches, and prepares publications. “There are very few people who really have made a career out of storm chasing,” she adds. The multiple sources of income for Twisters’ storm chasers, from live streaming the footage to selling t-shirts around a cult of personality, reflect the real-life difficulty of making it a full time career.
Bad behavior does happen, too. Technology bears some responsibility. Apps and smartphones make it easier now to interpret storm data to target tornadoes than it did 20 years ago. A mentorship or meteorological education is no longer as necessary. “Because people have more access to the data, people take greater risks,” Homeyer says. “People will go, you know, within a mile of these things sometimes, and that is personally something I would never be comfortable doing.”
Despite their reckless behavior, the film’s storm chasers do something that should be encouraged: they look after local communities. “If you do see a tornado, don't just be thinking about the clicks, likes, and shares. Be thinking about sharing your storm. Report to the National Weather Service, so that they can use it in their warning decision.” Tanamachi says. “Take a picture, take a video and send that stuff in to help other people.”
Fact #5: It is hard to rate a tornado accurately.
During an emotional reckoning, Tyler Owens (played by Glen Powell) comforts Kate Cooper (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones). As a young student, she miscategorized a tornado’s strength. This led to the death of two friends and her boyfriend.
Owens highlights how hard it is to rate tornadoes. Indeed, they aren’t measured like other major storms. Hurricane categories, for instance, are entirely wind-based. “The scales of the two phenomena are so different,” Homeyer says. “The challenge with tornadoes is that the scale of the tornadoes often is smaller than the scales of the measurements that we can make, especially from radar,” he adds. Wind speeds often cannot be measured reliably.
Owens also emphasizes to Cooper that a “hindsight is always 20/20” kind of solace, when he highlights that tornadoes are rated largely based on damage.
Thanks to the groundbreaking work of Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita in the mid-twentieth century, damage paths are heavily analyzed to this day to reconstruct a picture of the tornado. From the debris and the land scars, analysts determine what was a tornado, and what was just a strong wind. Downed trees, roof failure, collapsed houses, and exposed foundations are all clues. Getting a certain wind measurement in a tornado isn’t enough to justify a rating, even if the speed might qualify a tornado to the highest rating. A lack of damage indicators, which would provide context for what the funnel was really like, could mean the tornado won’t get that label.
