Tornadoes appear around the world, but are most common in the United States. And they’ve been main plot points in films throughout the past century. Perhaps among the most popular is the 1996 classic, Twister. Now, 28 years later, Twisters, a successor film of sorts and now in theaters, leans into the same elusive lure tornadoes bring. The central premise of Twisters is that, somehow, humans can throw chemicals into a tornado to absorb the tropical moisture that gives rise to these storms and thereby pull the plug on the funnel.
Twisters is just the latest fictional exploration at how we might control clouds. In X-Men, Storm controls the weather to fight. Star Trek features weather modification systems. The idea even appears in The Jetsons. But how much of the Twisters movie is based on real science? We spoke with two weather experts who say it's a lot of wishful thinking.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead)
Just because you could, doesn’t mean you should
How to intentionally dissipate a tornado is not an active topic of scientific research. For background, tornadoes form when a clash of fast and slow winds and a mix of hot and cold air all coming in from various heights and directions cause air to twist horizontally. This twisting causes a massive thunderstorm, called a supercell, to form. Then, when warm air moving upwards reaches heavier cold air it gains momentum. This causes the horizontally twisting air to turn vertical — creating what’s known as a tornado.
Tornadoes are all about gargantuan scales. With the exception of their duration — most tornadoes last less than a minute, Robin Tanamachi, associate professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University, tells Inverse — tornadoes boast several atomic bombs’ worth of power. Their raw ingredients pour in from along much of the width and length of the United States. When a tornado reaches a mile in height, that often draws some attention. But according to Tanamachi, what we see is just the tip of the iceberg.
The ultimate purpose of a tornado is for nature to eliminate tension fast. “The thing that you have to remember is that hurricanes and tornadoes have a purpose in the atmosphere, and that is to very quickly alleviate energy imbalance,” Tanamachi says. With a tool in hand to dissipate a single tornado, as the Twisters protagonist dreams of creating, scientists would have to ask themselves if the solution is better or worse than what comes as a consequence.
Speaking hypothetically, Tanamachi says the instability still needs to be released somewhere. “If it's not through a tornado or through a hurricane, it's going to be through some other mechanism. Maybe the hurricane or tornado forms in a different place. Or instead of having several smaller storms, you have just one larger storm.”
Can we blow up a tornado?
“I get these emails like every year from people asking, you know, why don't we just blow missiles into tornadoes, or, why don't we just fire missiles into tornadoes and use them to blow the tornado up,” Tanamachi says.
She’s run the numbers. “I have this exercise that I do with my students in my thunderstorms and tornadoes class where we work out the exact amount of energy that's in a tornado at a given instant in time.”
The true height of a tornado, when including the circulation system in the clouds, is about eight miles. Factor in a tornado width of roughly 650 meters across. The energy in that column “turns out to be on the order of about one Hiroshima atomic bomb per second,” Tanamachi says. You’d need 60 such bombs to thoroughly neutralize the circulation associated with a minute-long tornado.
“Just releasing that amount of energy into the atmosphere, releasing the shrapnel and all the byproducts of a nuclear weapon, is probably not an advisable course of action. The students tend to come to this conclusion that it's not only impractical. It's also extremely ill-advised to try to mitigate tornadoes in the way that is usually suggested, which is to try to explode them,” Tanamachi says.
Can you dry out a tornado?
When water vapor in the sky converts into liquid water or ice crystals, it releases heat. This heat fuels tornadoes and thunderstorms. So, in theory, drying out the moisture in the air could bring the fearsome system to a halt.
But you’d need the impossible. “We'd have to build a miniature Sun, basically, in order to do something like that, in order to truly counteract a thunderstorm in an energetic sense,” Tanamachi says.
You can remedy a water spill by letting it dry out, or soaking it up with a paper towel. Using chemicals to mimic the latter is another idea.
But you’d have to coat the landscape with it, and even then, Tanamachi’s gut instinct says it is “just not going to be practical.”
What does modern geoengineering research say?
The technology doesn’t exist to even begin to attempt to manipulate the processes that operate in these storms, Cameron Homeyer, interim director of the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, tells Inverse.
There are decades of work into cloud seeding, where geoengineers could draw out moisture from clouds to create precipitation. But Homeyer says the research has been inconclusive.
For one, “it's very difficult to do those experiments at scales that have an impact on something like a storm,” Homeyer says.
“You can have some local impacts, or you can see certain things change or happen. But you can repeat that experiment in two seemingly similar environments and get completely different outcomes. So there's not really an obvious demonstration that we could have a reliable, or even practical, impact on what a storm does with any technology that we have.”
Taming a tornado is a noble idea. But at least for now, it’s a premise best explored where there’s a dash of Hollywood movie magic.
