Consider This from NPR - 'Twister,' 'Twisters' and the actual practice of storm chasing

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

A plucky meteorology heroine; a male rival with no shortage of hubris; and some very, very big storms: that's the basic formula behind the new disaster action movie Twisters, which follows storm chasers around Oklahoma amid a tornado outbreak.It's a standalone sequel to the 1996 film Twister, a box-office hit in its day which also spurred a lot of real-life research into severe storms.We've since learned a lot about how tornadoes behave, and the technology of storm chasing has improved dramatically. But behind these summer blockbusters is a mystery that scientists are still trying to solve: why do tornadoes form at all?For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

There is a mystery. Elusive. Unpredictable. It terrifies most scientists. You could not find a happier 7-year-old boy in May 1996 than me. Because my parents, in their utter wisdom, decided to take me and my sister to the movies to see Twister. In it, Helen Hunt leads a ragtag group of storm chasers trying to launch a data gathering probe into a tornado for science. Bill Paxson plays her estranged husband and former storm chaser,

showing up to get her to officially sign the divorce papers. Whoa, whoa, whoa. You missed a page. What? Right here. Christ, would you just sign it so we can get out of here? Please? We? She's here? Yes, she's here. She's over with us. And while that plotline lingers,

a rival storm chaser, who, according to the movie, is only in it for the money, is trying to launch his own data probe into a tornado, just as a line of powerful and dangerous storms approaches Oklahoma. All right, maybe Twister wasn't the most realistic depiction of a storm disaster with its airborne cows and the sideways house our heroes literally drive through, but it was an enormous hit, the second highest grossing film of the year, below Independence Day, but ahead of the first Tom Cruise Mission Impossible. And it launched a wave of interest in storm chasing and extreme weather meteorology. This weekend, 28 years later, we've got a sequel of sorts, Twisters. We've never seen tornadoes like this before, and we need your help.

No, I don't chase anymore. Kate, we can save lives. I'll give you one week. An unrelated story, but similar ideas, a plucky heroine, a rival with no shortage of hubris, and some monstrous forces of nature. You thought you could destroy a tornado. We never had a chance. You want one? The technology has changed a lot from 1996 to 2024, both in the movies and in real-life storm chasing. And we've learned a lot more about how tornadoes behave. But consider this. Behind this summer blockbuster and its predecessor is a mystery that actual meteorologists are still trying to solve. Why do tornadoes form at all?

From NPR. If you had to pinpoint the start of modern scientific storm chasing, you might start in 1972 with an engineering professor named Neil Ward. He sends this proposal to the National Severe Storms Lab proposing that they get a army tank and drive it into a tornado so that they can collect measurements from within the storm. Kate Carpenter is writing a book about the history of storm chasing. She says the tank's idea didn't work out, but they come back to him and they're like, you have some interesting ideas about how we can forecast and get close to storms. We're going to give you a lot less money than you asked for,

but come down and we'll try it out. Neil Ward died of a heart attack before he got to live out his proposal. But soon after, groups of university students went out into the field. They do catch a couple and at the end of the season successfully photograph one. And so it sort of proves that this is possible. Fast forward to the present day. Research in order to better understand and forecast tornadoes is definitely still around. In fact, after the original Twister premiered in 1996, the meteorology program at the University of Oklahoma saw their enrollment literally double in the couple of years after that movie was released. Robin Tanamachi is a professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University.

She and her husband are both storm chasers. And we talked about what storm chasing is all about in real life. But first, I had to know if she remembered seeing that first Twister movie back in 1996. Oh, I certainly do. I was in high school when that film came out. So just to preface, I should say, I knew I wanted to research severe weather ever since I was a little kid. And so then finding out that there was a Hollywood film about it was, of course, you know, required viewing for me. So I got some of my high school friends together. We went to a theater and we saw it. You know, what I saw on the screen, I could tell was, you know, very much a Hollywood product.

And I recall that in the middle of the original Twister film, there's a scene in which hail begins falling. And it was really clear to me that it was not real hail. It was like ice out of the hotel ice machine where the crew was staying. And I remember I just emitted this big guffaw in the middle of the theater and everyone was turning at me and shushing me and, you know, why is that funny? That shouldn't really be funny. So you were fact-checking this movie even back then. Can you describe to me the first time you went out storm chasing? So the first time I went out storm chasing was in 2001. I was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison at the time.

And we went out in a van for a week to the Great Plains to just observe storms and document them and collect whatever data we could using kind of some basic handheld instruments. Well, I'll tell you, I learned more about meteorology in that one week on the road than I did in the previous, you know, three to four years in the classroom. Everything just really came together and clicked. And I've carried that ethos forward as a professor. So we take the students out, kind of like I did, for a week into the planes after we've given them a nice crash course in severe storms forecasting. And the students get some hands-on experience with deploying meteorological instruments in a real storm environment. And we teach them above all how to do that safely and effectively and how to log the data so that people can use it for years into the future. You know, besides teaching, when it comes to

your own research, what's the goal for scientists and researchers in chasing tornadoes and studying them? Like, what don't we know that we're still trying to figure out in 2024? So one of the last big mysteries that we're tackling right now is the question of exactly how the process of tornado genesis happens. And tornado genesis is our technical term for tornado formation. So we can see two storms that look identical on radar, and 10 minutes later, one of them will be producing a tornado and the other one doesn't. And it's really, really hard to tell the difference.

So we've had many, many field programs over the years. I've participated in quite a few of them where we basically throw all the instruments that we can at the storm. So think like mobile radar trucks and radiosondes, meaning weather balloons. We have aircraft that fly overhead and take radar scans. We have drones now, things that I didn't have when I was a graduate student that go out and they take thermodynamic measurements in the environment around the storm. And all of that is just to, as one of my mentors used to put it, peel back layers of the onion of the tornado problem. And as you know, when you cut up an onion and you peel back a layer,

there's always going to be more layers underneath, and it takes a while to get to the core of the problem. Obviously, the films will jack it up to make entertainment, but is this work dangerous? It can be. It's not necessarily the tornado that's the most hazardous thing that we're dealing with. It's actually the really bad driving conditions in and around severe storms, because as you can imagine, the environment around a tornadic storm is generally pretty rainy. We can have very large hail, especially if the storm is particularly strong. It can have a very strong updraft that's capable of launching big hailstones at you. So you

can be driving along and suddenly a five-inch hailstone will crater your windshield and you have to pull over and figure out what to do. And there's also a lot of distractions that happen within the vehicle. Usually you're not traveling by yourself. I do not recommend storm chasing by yourself, but you're probably out there with a partner or two in the vehicle who may be looking at images on their phone or on a computer. So there's going to be a lot of digital distractions, a lot of chatter going on within the vehicle, and then you're having to contend with this very adverse environment outside where the light levels might be changing, the visibility levels might be changing. And yeah, unfortunately, you know, the few fatalities that we've experienced within the storm chaser community, a lot of those have to do with accidents that have happened on wet roads,

either before or after the chase, and not necessarily during the chase itself. We have had a few fatalities, unfortunately, from the tornado itself, but literally I can count the number of people who've died from the tornado while chasing on one hand. And unfortunately, I was there on the day that that happened, and I can definitely appreciate, you know, why it happened. It was a very bewildering situation that was basically, you know, a perfect toxic mixture that unfortunately took the lives of some people that I really admired. Did that shake you up at all? Like, were you ever thinking about leaving this work? I never thought about leaving the profession of meteorology as a result of having

gone through that experience. At the time, my husband and I were just starting a family. In fact, I was seven months pregnant when we went on that chase. But it really did drive home for me the fact that, you know, I have other responsibilities in life now, and I need to take care of my family and my children. In addition to also, you know, going out and doing this research that I know is going to help, you know, peel back some layers of the tornado onion problem.

And, you know, I can still contribute in that way, even as I'm raising a family. So it rearranged my priorities, but it didn't really change them that much. Before we started rolling, you were telling me that you did see the new twisters. And I'm curious, how did this one compare to the 96 one? So there's, there's obviously some things have changed. since 1996. I did see a lot more like what we actually use in the field. Of course, there are a few groaner lines that kind of made me slap my head when I was in the theater. But the movie, by and large, was very entertaining. And I thought it captured a little bit better the moral fluidity that has to go along with storm chasing. We are out there observing phenomena that sometimes kills and hurts people.

And so, you know, what is our responsibility to the people that get killed and hurt by tornadoes? The film deals with that in some sense a lot more than the original one did. That was Robin Tanamachi, professor of atmospheric science at Purdue University in Indiana. This episode was produced by Brianna Scott,

who also contributed reporting. It was edited by Patrick Jernwatanan. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Andrew Limbaugh.