A friendly reminder: Twisters is a work of fiction. You don’t need a scientist to tell you that driving straight into a tornado is a horrible idea—and you certainly already guessed that killing a storm isn’t possible. But after talking to Jana Houser, an atmospheric scientist and professor at Ohio University specializing in the formation of tornadoes, I learned that a good amount of the science in Twisters is based on real meteorological work. In fact, Houser may even be the inspiration for Daisy Edgar-Jones’s character, Kate Carter.
“Last spring, I was out with a film crew [from Twisters], and we were trying to film skies for the backdrop that they can use for their CGI tornadoes,” Houser told me over the phone. “I did a behind-the-scenes interview with the scientific coordinator, Kevin Kelleher. He said to me, ‘We’re actually following you, and we wanted to kind of loosely base her character on some of your work.’ ” Houser can’t confirm that she directly inspired Kate Carter. But she did watch Twisters thinking, Oh, was that a reference to my work? Or maybe I’m just hopeful or dreaming that it was.
Now, Houser may not have a barn full of childhood tornado experiments in Oklahoma, but she always knew that she wanted study tornadoes. “We joke in this field that we are genetically modified to want to do it from the time we’re born,” she says. “Back in the eighties, when I was in second grade, I watched the Weather Channel as religiously as kids watch cartoons. I made my dad order me Weather Channel home videos on tornado chasing. Then when Twister came out, I was like, Yes, this is awesome.” Since getting her Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma, she’s spent the past twenty-some years chasing storms. “I don’t have a running total of the tornadoes I’ve seen in my life, but I’m probably close to the forty to fifty mark,” she says.
Oh, and remember the idea in Twisters to capture 3D images of a tornado using military-grade tech? That’s something that Houser is currently working on. “The utilization of these three phased array radars in order to triangulate the winds within the tornado is right up my alley,” she notes. “That is exactly what my pie-in-the-sky, holy-grail data collection would look like.”
In fact, Houser is “in collaborations right now trying to figure out how can we actually make this work.” For starters, “we would never want to get as close to the tornado as they are getting,” she explains. “Even if you’re driving through cornfields to deploy your instruments, the tornadoes are moving so quickly that you would literally only have seconds to capture the tornado. It’s not worth it. From a realistic sense, we would be deploying at farther distances. But this idea is real.”
Below, Houser talks about whether you can stop a tornado—and if there’s a scientific reason why Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones don’t kiss at the end of the film.
ESQUIRE: Outside of the questionable science, did you enjoy the film?
JANA HOUSER: Yeah, it was nice. I did like it. There were times that I had to switch off my science brain and just remember, This is a movie. It’s not supposed to necessarily represent reality. But yeah, I thought the storyline overall was really good. I wish that they had made Kate’s mom Helen Hunt. From what I understand, she was approached about that and declined. So at least they made an effort. That would have been a really nice link between the first one and this one. But I thought the science was, in general, pretty good.
What was the most glaring inaccuracy?
The one big takeaway I would like to be made known is that you can’t destroy a tornado. That is fiction. I get emails from people claiming they can do ridiculous things, or that they have figured out tornadoes because of the tide and the moon and all kinds of really bizarre things. They seriously think they’ve got it. You never know what some yahoo is going to try to do in the name of science. So I guess I want that to be clear.
There isn’t any groundwork for the idea of stopping a tornado with a sodium-polyacrylate solution?
No, it is not anything that anybody is working on. I was talking to a colleague of mine who was also intimately involved with the production and served as kind of a technical correspondent. He did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and came up with some ridiculous number—like tons of material that you would need to use to neutralize the kilotons of moisture in these ginormous thunderstorms. In theory, it might be possible to shoot silver iodine and this diaper material into the atmosphere. But the feasibility of it working in the first place is very small. And presumably, the environmental effects are going to be more catastrophic than the tornado itself.
What about the truck that screws itself into the ground?
Sean Casey [inventor of the Tornado Intercept Vehicle and creator of the IMAX film Tornado Alley] is the originator of that idea. I’ve spent time in the original vehicle. It was equipped with hydraulics and spikes that were driven into the ground if we got close.
Wait, the truck is real?
A real thing. They’re not like drills. It’s more like hydraulic spikes. The unrealistic part in the movie was that you want your vehicle to be as close to the ground as physically possible. If you have any room between your vehicle and the ground, there’s still room enough in there for the tornado winds to get under your vehicle and flip it. So in practice, Sean’s vehicle replaces the whole suspension and puts a hydraulic system in there to lower the vehicle to the ground, and then the spikes go in so that you’re stable. But I like to caution that the objective was never to get into an EF5 tornado. The objective is maybe EF0, EF1, or EF2 at the most. It’s just a safety protocol. If you find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time, you have safety, but the primary objective isn’t to get into the tornado.
It’s mentioned in the film that no one knows exactly how a tornado forms. Is that correct?
There are elements of that statement that are correct. We know from a physics sense what it takes to form a tornado. We know that we need to have a thunderstorm with a strong updraft coupled with rotation that is already very close to the ground. That updraft basically sucks the air upward, very much like how an ice skater pulls her arms in the air and rotates faster and faster. That sort of physical mechanism we understand. The part that we don’t understand is what creates those conditions in the first place. The more I study this topic, I firmly believe that there’s not a one-and-done answer to how that happens.
Do you think that further work in the field can help lengthen the prediction time for tornadoes before they strike—like what they’re researching in the film?
Fundamentally, tornadoes form on very short time scales. We’re talking about a minute or less. So even if we had a blanket of radars that can see the near-ground rotation as it’s forming, the theoretical lead time on that is within that one-minute time frame. Obviously that’s not helpful, so we can’t base our warnings around that. Instead, a hypothetical utopian future would allow us to use forecasting models to show us where storms are going to be in one hour, two hour, three hours, and correctly identify which storms would produce tornadoes. If we could get to a place where we have technology to observe all of those different principles, we could have predictability of perhaps one to two hours.
I wish you could also tell me that there’s a scientific reason as to why Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones don’t kiss at the end of the movie.
Right? I don’t know. I have no science involved in “If you feel it, chase it.”
