For hurricanes to come The twisters came a flurry of warnings that worried Richard Smith. This was almost a personal matter.
Smith is a meteorologist’s warning coordinator for the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla., and all of the things in the film affected his situation. He said, surely, in real life, watches and warnings would have been given.
Furthermore, he questioned the film’s portrayal of people who live in the international hurricane court and are well acquainted with them. “It seemed like Oklahomans were confused and didn’t know what to do,” he said.
Despite those warnings, and a major project that hurricane experts found particularly troubling, he and other meteorologists issued them. The twisters – summer blockbuster released 28 years after the first Twister – a good grade of scientific accuracy, at least a solid B.
Smith admitted to some prejudice. Meteorologists at the Norman center, NOAA’s hurricane center that includes the Hurricane Prediction Center and the National Hurricane Center, were heavily involved in training team members and staff.
” READ MORE: Norman, Okla., is the national hurricane forecasting center
“They came in motivated and very interested,” said Smith, who led a team of 18 of them in May 2023 and made a cameo in the movie, especially Daisy Edgar-Jones.
The courts,’ summary of the storm plan
Edgar-Jones, who plays Oklahoma native and storm chaser Kate Carter, pursues a mysterious dream that aims to eradicate hurricanes by injecting a chemical mixture into their regions. Don Quixote would have had better luck against windmills, say real hurricane experts. After her boyfriend and two others are killed during a raid, she takes a job at NOAA in New York working in the weather service office. We will come back to that.
He is later sent back to chase during a major disaster in Oklahoma, and during a critical week of storm action, he is joined by Glen Powell, a former rodeo star turned chaser. named Tyler Owens, who seduces him into chasing the hurricane. – swinging.
Somehow, embedded in the maelstroms that follow is the story of a kissless love triangle. (Maybe those 200 mph winds killed the mood.)
What ‘Twisters’ got right
While most of the storm’s winds were remarkably kind to Edgar-Jones’ makeup (25 people were listed on the makeup crew) and Powell’s coiffure, footage of what happens on the ground as the monster twister rotates the path of destruction fascinated Kevin. Kelleher, former deputy director of the hurricane laboratory.
Kelleher, who worked with the writers for more than two years, says: “I think they were really accurate, maybe exaggerating.” Kelleher, now retired, was also involved in the first Twister.
The next topic was more about the weather, Smith said: “The words, the jargon speaks volumes. I think the homework paid off.”
He quoted the incident to The twisters where the Doppler radar image “exactly shows the state of the storm,” he said.
However, the Doppler reference was the source of a gaffe early in the film. “There were two problems,” Kelleher said.
” READ MORE: It was Ted Fujita who found a way to determine the strength of hurricanes by analyzing photographs.
What ‘Twisters’ is wrong.
During the morning scene, the chaser says, “Doppler doesn’t show a storm until this afternoon.”
That call resulted in high levels of “frustration” among meteorologists, Smith said. Doppler knows. It is not in the business of predicting. It may receive hurricane signatures in storms, perhaps 15 to 20 minutes first, which started the warnings.
Smith is sure that in the climate where Kate and Tyler go to the rodeo that is interrupted by a giant hurricane, the warnings would have been given before all the iPhone alarms went off. “That rodeo would have been canceled,” he said. “But now you can’t have a movie.
After disasters, without credentials, Kate, Tyler and others have free access to disaster areas Of course, access would be limited for security reasons – think live wires, weak building materials, and theft. “They’re pretty much locked down,” Smith said.
” READ MORE: Forty years ago, a deadly tornado hit Pennsylvania. Can it happen again?
As for Kate’s job at NOAA as the weather forecast office in Manhattan, where Smith appears, NOAA has no such office in New York City. Located on Long Island.
What worried meteorologists most about ‘Twisters’
Kate and Tyler’s plan to quell storms by dousing them with copious amounts of water-absorbing sodium polyacrylate and silver iodide, used in cloud seeding, has been a source of great concern among scientists.
“Hurricanes and the storms that create them are large, impossibly complex systems with incalculable energy,” Sean Waugh, a research meteorologist with NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, says. YouTube video.
Waugh said that, even if such a drug did exist, “the effects of those chemicals or energies are unknown and may cause as much or more damage as hurricanes do.” themselves.”
But when he spoke with the scriptwriters, Kelleher said he was told that including that part of the plot was “non-negotiable.”
So he worked with the authors to develop a “theoretical” scenario in which it might be successful.
After the tornado collides with an oil refinery and turns into a fire-breathing EF5, Kate puts the mixture into the twister, and it explodes.
“That was my get-out-of-jail-free card,” says Kelleher. In the film, the explosion of the rain has doubts about whether it was the wisdom of Kate and Tyler or the encounter with the refinery that was the destruction of the twister, the plan of the project Kelleher suggested. “They kept that in, and I’m happy about that,” he said.
Harold E. Brooks, a senior research scientist at the hurricane laboratory, said he would have been more comfortable if the script had declared the experiment a complete failure. He said: “I’m scared to death that people would try to do those things.
What about climate change and ‘Twisters’?
Director Lee Isaac Chung has been blamed for the film’s failure to address climate change. He said his intention was not to save the world. “I don’t feel like movies are meant to convey a message,” he said in a CNN interview.
How a warming planet affects storms is one of the many uncertainties of climate change, say NOAA researchers.
” READ MORE: The number of tornadoes has increased in Pennsylvania
While the number of hurricanes with winds of at least 80 mph has not changed much, they are happening on fewer days, but the number of days with major hurricanes has increased, NOAA said. Most occur in the fall and winter, but fewer in the spring and summer.
NOAA’s summary: “So far, most research stops short of linking historical changes in storm behavior to a warming climate.”
All scientific disputes aside, said Smith Twisters: “It’s a movie.
“It was a lot of fun.”
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