The Musical Innertube - Volume 2, Number 150 - Carl Parker talks about Twisters

JOHN

Ladies and gentlemen, in this special episode of the Musical Innertube, we will be discussing the movies Twister and Twisters. Spoiler alert: we'll be talking about a lot of plot twists and questions that arise in the movie Twisters. So, if you haven't seen it yet, see it and come back to us. We'll be here.

DON

And our special guest on the Musical Innertube today to talk about tornadoes, all things tornadoes, and all things Twisters is Carl Parker. Carl is a meteorologist with The Weather Channel based in Atlanta, and he has been doing a lot of work for The Weather Channel on big storms like hurricanes and tornadoes, and he's done a lot of specialty work in research on those two topics. So, he's the perfect guy to tell us whether or not Twisters could actually work. Welcome again to the Innertube, Carl Parker.

CARL

Thank you so much for having me. Nice to join you again.

DON

 The original Twister, which I saw in 1996, I started to wonder how people could get so close to a tornado and not be sucked in. And I wondered that again about Twisters when I saw the new movie just the other day. So, let's start with that basic question, Carl, how close can you get to a tornado safely?

CARL

Well, you know there, there are people, there's a trend in chasing, which is, you know, not something that any of us in the professional side condone, which is called zero metering, where they get right into tornado. And you know there's some people that are equipped to, you know, Reed Timmer and some others have been driving these crazy vehicles and, you know, that was one of the plot points that in the newer movie, where the truck has, you know, drills, essentially, that anchor the vehicle. And there are vehicles like that. But they're not just plain old pickup trucks. They're, you know, actually more like tanks, and they're sort of rounded, and they, you know, they've got, you know, all kinds of armor and they're protection for the windows. That was one of the plot holes in the new movie, you know, even though yes, it is a thing to kind of dig into the ground and anchor yourself, you have to have a much, much more reinforced vehicle to do that. I mean, one of the first things that would have happened is the windows would have been blown out of that pickup truck, but in terms of, yeah, there are people who have gotten into them, no question about that. You know, that's another of the things that is, you know, not quite right about the movie where you know somebody is, you know, right in front of somebody and one person gets, you know, drawn up and another does not. You know, there are plenty of cases where there's, you know, there's a suction force. There's a vertical motion and you'll see, for example roofs being taken up and into tornadoes. But when you think about a roof, you know, once there's a little bit of a wind intrusion, then a roof has got a lot of wall space or a lot of area relative to its weight. So it's one of those things that can be taken up very easily. But in terms of something that's more dense, like a person or a vehicle, you know, you're really going to have to be in the middle of that for that to occur. So, you know it has happened and I've seen that - there was actually an incredible video from, I think it was in Dallas, from many years ago, where, you know, tractor or trailers from tractor trailers, which again have a lot of, you know, of area, were drawn right up and into a tornado. So, you know it does happen that way. But I think generally speaking, first of all, more of the motion is horizontal. It's more lateral than a vertical motion, a.  And b, if you're that close, you know pretty much everything is going to be, you know, wiped away in some form of fashion.

JOHN

Let me ask you about storm chasing and storm chasers, just in general. In the late 90s, it was this huge thing that led as you, as you know better than we do, to several television shows about storm chasing and storm chasers, many of whom aren’t with us anymore, sadly. And I'm wondering whether the function of storm chasers has changed since the first movie in the last 30 years or so. Do they gather as much information as they used to? They used to be the leaders, in a way, they used to get new stuff, and there was sort of a race to find out new stuff about tornadoes. I'm wondering if it's still the same today. Or are there fewer of them? Or are there different ways to find out the same Information?

CARL

Well I think there are many more chasers today than there have ever been. You know, you can look, you know, chasers have these geotags. And so you can see, you know, in some cases, on big days, hundreds of these out in the plains. And there are many, many people that are doing this. Now you've got different groups, you know. One is the research side, so that's people from, you know, the National Severe Storms Laboratory and other university organizations that are doing really great work, you know they've been using what's called the DOW, the Doppler on Wheels, where they take this very powerful radar, and they get it into the field, and they get these incredible radar images of the tornado. So, you've got the research side, but then you've got, you know, people that are both meteorologically trained but also photographers. So, kind of, you know, in the middle. And then on another end, you've got people that don't really have a lot of training, and they're kind of thrill seekers and I think that group has really been growing, much to the chagrin of more experienced chasers, because it is inherently a very risky thing to do. There was a case of a guy who, you know, hadn't had much training recently, you know, got into, you know, I guess, around the periphery of the tornado and it rains car off the road, and you really have to know what you're doing. And even when you know what you're doing, that's not always enough. You know, there was a guy named Tim Samaris who was one of the most experienced chasers around. And he got caught by the El Reno tornado, which was a two-mile-wide tornado, and it had satellite tornadoes spinning around it that were traveling as fast as 185 mph. And you know, he didn't make it out of there. And he knew everything about everything when it came to tornadoes. So, you can only imagine, you know, how people are worried about this explosion of, you know, non-trained chasers who were just looking to put content on social media and otherwise, you know, a lot of us feel that, you know, there's going to be some very serious outcomes as a result of that.

JOHN

By the way, you mentioned the name of Tim Samaras, who was the subject of a pretty well-watched television series, but also there's a great book about him by Brantley Hargrove, which I reviewed a couple of years ago, called The Man Who Caught The Storm. It's beautifully written, vividly presented, teaches you an awful lot about how tornadoes form, and you may have some feelings about this book, I'm not sure, but I thought it was a wonderful read and I'd love to recommend it to our audience.

Speaker 3

No, I haven't read that book, but I'm sure that I would enjoy it very much. I would love to read something like that. You know, I am fascinated by the whole tornado mystery, essentially. You know, we have a rough idea of what causes tornadoes, but. you know. we don't understand the very last steps. Why is it that some storms that are, you know, rotating, and that's the first part of it is you need a rotating storm for these really well-developed tornadoes, why is it that some of them produce tornadoes and some do not? And it's an ongoing area of research, and it's really fascinating to see. I don't know if you've heard of a guy named Doctor Leigh Orf, spelled L-E-I-G-H. He's got many videos on YouTube and what he does are these advanced supercomputer simulations of tornadoes. And from this, and they've, you know, checked this against observations in the field, and from this, what we have gleaned is that, you know, a tornado is not really - you think of a tornado as a thing, you know, like it's this one thing. And it's not really at all. It's amazing when you look at these animations, which you realize is that there are these hundreds of strips of vorticity or spin and they're like, you know, little tornadoes, you know, in and of themselves. And what they do is that they're constantly fed into this area where they begin to aggregate. And they just start to all spin around each other when conditions are right. And so, you know, oftentimes when chasers are in the field, you'll hear, hear them referring to a multi-vortex tornado, “Oh, we've got a multi vortex tornado on the ground,” where you see, you can clearly see that there are several tornadoes within the larger field that are rotating about each other. But what you can glean from this this this work that Doctor Leigh Orf is doing is that probably every tornado is a multi-vortex tornado, because they're all this collection of these little strips that are rotating about each other, and they're extremely complex, and it's so fascinating because this guy knows so much about tornado dynamics. I mean, you know, he knows it up one side and down the other, and there are points when he's describing his simulations, where he'll say, “I don't know why that is, or what that is”. So, we're just, you know, we're, we have enough computer power to simulate what's happening, but we can't explain why it's happening, but at the same time they can relate that to what's being seen in the field, so they know that it's probably, you know, a reasonable simulation of what's happening.

JOHN

This came up while we were watching Twisters yesterday, when Don and I went to the movie theater, actually. And we were the only people in the theater that we were in, and we were making all sorts of jokes and stuff. But one of the things that did arise - well, you know, it's a movie. Let's just face it. It's a movie. You can joke a lot about while it's running. Just like the first one was. This is the big question. How much do we still not know about these tornadoes? I guess the way they form is, it seems unutterably complex as you've just sketched out, but also, they tend to resolve in ways that you don't expect either, which is really heavily leaned-on in both movies. The propensity for tornadoes not to do what you expect. And it's so interesting. It's sort of like flight itself. We know that airplanes fly, but no one can actually explain why they stay in the sky. We know they do. And we know there must be something going on like XY and Z, but the actual explanation, we ain’t quite there yet. And that's got to drive, well,  folks like you crazy!

CARL

Yeah, well, that's, you know, that's the ball game right there. I mean, that's why, you know, Leigh Orf is doing the work that he's doing, and, you know, many other scientists in the field, Karen Kosiba and Paul Markowski, who, by the way, was at Penn State when I was at the station in Harrisburg, WHTM, he was an intern with me. And he ended up being one of the leaders in tornado research, and this is, you know, ongoing work that they're doing, I mean we understand the broad strokes which are that you know you start with wind shear, you have warm and humid air that is feeding into a storm, usually from a you know roughly southerly or southeasterly component, and then you've got a flow that is coming across that, a little bit higher maybe at about you know 5000 feet in the atmosphere, and because it's coming across that inflow of warm, humid air gets it spinning and that is then fed into this developing thunderstorm. So, the center of the Storm begins to rotate, and there's this massive circulation at the center, which is called the meso-cyclone that can extend, you know, miles up into the atmosphere. So, you start with this rotating storm, but then there are other storm dynamics that develop, including this balance between that warm and humid inflow and then cooler air, because once the air rises up through the updraft, then it begins to fall out and precipitate in the front of the storm and then some of that cool air wraps around the back of the storm as well. So, you have what's called the forward flank, downdraft and the rear flank downdraft. And tornado-producing storms have a real balance between these forces that warm and humid inflow and the updraft and the downdrafts when they maintain a balance between those things, that's when they tend to be more dangerous for tornadoes, but then the downdrafts themselves also factor into this because, as the forward flank downdraft drops down, and that colder air hits the ground, well the cold air is more dense than the warmer air that is coming in. So, the cold air sort of curls around, which you've probably seen this in photographs where if you have a microburst, the edge of it will form a foot and kind of curl around. And so that curling develops all along that inflow, and that's called the streamwise vorticity current, and that too is feeding this vorticity into the storm. So, you know, in terms of these broad strokes, we have a really good general understanding of that. But the question that remains is, why is it that you can have that in some cases, and it works to produce a tornado, why is it that it doesn't in other cases? You know, these are smaller scale features with a very large-scale parent storm that's huge, that's, you know, 10 miles across and 10 miles deep and 10 miles high. And that's the part that, hopefully, we'll be able to resolve in the future, but part of it is also an information thing. I mean, you know, we've got these Doppler radars that are spread all over the country. And it's a very good network, and they're very powerful radars. Developed and put out for the most part come online in 1988. But we need a lot more, really. I mean that's the problem with, you know, with geological modeling too, is you just need more information going in than we have. There a lot of holes, and particularly in more rural parts of the country. You know, as the earth is curving away from the radar beam, you're shooting higher and higher beams at the storms. So, you're seeing a much higher part of the storm, and it doesn't tell you what's happening at the low levels of the storm. And that's, you know, the business end, that's where the tornado is.

Speaker 2

And those rural areas could probably use a lot more coverage, because that's where tornadoes pop up. And that was another thing that came to mind while watching these, and also while actually doing forecasts, and that is the terrain also plays a part in this because Tornado Alley is across Oklahoma, Texas, into Kansas - although tornadoes have been known to pop up anywhere, they pop up here in Pennsylvania, they've popped up in New England. How much does terrain play a role in whether or not a tornado pops out?

CARL

Oh, it absolutely plays a role. I mean, in terms of very broad features, you've got, of course, the Gulf of Mexico, and so the warm and humid air that comes up into the eastern two-thirds of the country. Then the Rockies play a role because you have air that flows over the Rockies and then settles down a bit into the plains and creates what's called “the cap,” which is a layer of slightly warmer air aloft which suppresses thunderstorm activity until eventually it breaks through and can explode when it when it finally does, so you know, those are the big things. But also, local terrain has a role, there's no question about that. There are little tornado alleys that have developed as a result of terrain. You know, there's one for example, on the south side of Oklahoma City, and there's a little bit of terrain that most likely is having an impact there. They tend to get tornadoes in northeastern Alabama, of course, in central Alabama, but also in northeastern Alabama around Huntsville, and up into Chattanooga, and there's been research on that showing that the terrain adds to that environmental vorticity, that it adds to that spin that's getting into these storms. You see a similar thing in in your area, there's a little tornado alley that exists more towards the southern part of York County, in Lancaster County, and getting out towards the Philly suburbs, more so than farther north. And that was actually a big - there was a big hullaballoo about that many years ago when they decided to put the Doppler radar in in State College, because, you know, the people at the then Harrisburg Weather Service Office were saying, hey, look, the tornadoes are down here, we should have the radar down here, and I think that that was true. Because, you know, you don't get near the same amount of activity in, say, Northern Pennsylvania as you do in that southeastern part of the state.

DON

The other thing that you could say about a storm that produces a tornado is, and you were talking about it, in talking about how storms build into tornadoes, there is a little bit of everything in those storms. There's hot air, there's cold air, there's moist air. So, you go through a situation, and you do see this in the movies, where it starts as rain, then it goes into hail, and that's where you get some of that the cold moisture coming down, and then just the vorticity that that happens when cold and hot meet. It's kind of like if you drop an ice cube on a hot plate. I mean, you're going to get just a huge explosion of energy, and that's one of the reasons why I think probably tornadoes are as volatile as they are and why they pop up and then and then go away as quickly as they came.

CARL

Yeah. You know, instability is a big part of the question, and, you know, over the years I've been trying to, you know, find ways to sort of describe that. And so, one of the things I thought about - I think I actually thought about it when I was in the pool at one time - is that, if you have a ball, you know, some kind of a soft rubber ball or something, and you try to hold it underneath the water, well, it's going to try to jump out all the time. And the reason why that is, of course, is that the water is becoming more dense as you go farther down, and the air in the ball is much less dense. So the first thing that the ball wants to do is it wants to get to equilibrium by getting away from the more dense water, you know, down around your waist and get up to the less dense water that is near where the surface of the water is. So that's why it jumps out all the time. And a similar thing happens in the atmosphere where you start with this parcel of warm air and as long as it remains warmer than the surrounding environment, it's going to continue to rise up, to bubble up. And that's how we get deep moist convection developing. And so that's why the meteorologist look for an environment in which, if you were to take that parcel of air and you were to bring it up through the atmosphere and cool it at the rate at which it would typically cool, and it continued to be warmer - and particularly when it's going to be significantly warmer than the surrounding environment, because you have cooler air coming in aloft - well, then it's going to continue to rise and rise and rise and can punch up miles and miles into the atmosphere and sometimes very rapidly. And so that instability, that convective available potential energy is a huge part of what we look for, and that is about the supply of warm and humid air at the surface, but also about how the temperature profile changes, how it gets cooler in the upper atmosphere, as it often does when we've got a stronger parent storm coming in.

DON

We'll return to our talk with Carl in just a moment, but first, this soothing musical interlude.

JOHN

Carl Parker joined The Weather Channel as an on-camera meteorologist in 1999, and joined the expert team in 2011, where he could be found doing in-studio analysis for major weather events. Carl has also been focusing on extreme weather and climate change for several years.

DON

From 1995 to 1999, Carl was with KPRC TV in Houston, TX, gathering both personal and professional experience with tropical storms and hurricanes. Prior to Houston, Parker worked for WHTM TV and WHP TV in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He began his career in 1991 at WTVA-TV in Tupelo, Mississippi, while working on his BS in geosciences at Mississippi State University. He also has a graduate certificate in climate adaptation from NC State University and holds the American Meteorological Society's seal of approval.

JOHN

You can follow Carl by tuning in to The Weather Channel, or by visiting their website, The Weather Group.

DON

And now we return you to the Musical Innertube, already in progress.

Let's talk about a couple of things specific to the to the movies. In the first movie, the Twister movie that was released in 1996, the key to the whole thing was that they were trying to put sensors in the middle of a tornado to get readings on wind, on volatility, on moisture, on all these kind of things, which they had never been able to get - according to the plot of the movie - because you can't get inside a tornado. First of all, I know that there were some experiments at the time where they were trying to get scientific material inside tornadoes, and most of those ended in failure because the the stuff was destroyed when it got into the tornado. Did we ever get any good readings of what goes on inside a tornado to get data that that would help? Or are we still just relying on the Doppler radar that that takes a map of the whole place?

CARL

In terms of, you know, actual observations inside a tornado, I know there's been some work on that. I think you know, probably the more important work is with the DOW, the Doppler On Wheels, which has really painted a very clear picture of the dynamics in a tornado, and then as I mentioned, some of this simulation work that's been done as well, all the research that's, you know, associated with or adjacent to that. There's been a lot of high-resolution computer modeling that has, you know, been able to determine what these dynamics are like. But as far as actually sending up a lot of different little things into the tornado, I don't know that there's been a ton of that. And I think that is probably a recoverability issue. When you're talking about a storm that can send a check for 50 miles it's just too hard to do that.

DON

Yeah. And the new movie does have a place where they're putting up the Doppler radar on wheels. They're trying to triangulate it. They're trying to get around a tornado in three different areas and get a triangular vision of it. So I'm assuming that has a little bit of a basis in reality.

CARL

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's definitely a thing. That phased array radar where you're getting a more complete picture of the tornado by looking at it from several different sides. You know, they they've been doing that in the field for many years.

DON

In the old movie, Twister, they were just trying to get the data. In the new movie, Twisters, the main character has an idea that she will shoot material inside the tornado that will help to dry out the tornado, help to reduce the amount of moisture in there and help break it up. Is there any scientific data related to that? I mean, is that even a possibility?

CARL

Theoretically there is something to that, but you know there haven't been any experiments along those lines and you know the really important part is that there's so much scale and energy in a thunderstorm. You know, as I mentioned earlier, a severe thunderstorm is in many cases going to be 10 miles wide and 10 miles high. So, we we're talking about an area that is 1000 cubic miles and is an awfully large area to try to affect. And then when you've got a well-developed tornado, the energy that it's creating is something on the order of, like, an atomic bomb every second. So even if you could somehow manage to get enough of this material into the tornado right at the very right spot, and  you're talking about tons and tons and tons of this material, even if you could do that, you know, maybe it would work for a minute.  And then fail. So, I just think that, even though it's kind of fun for the movie, that's not really where the research is right now. It's really more about trying to understand the processes, and once we have a better understanding of what leads one storm to produce a tornado as opposed to another, you know, that's going to increase warning time. But in terms of actually disrupting tornadoes. I don't think that science is really looking that way.

DON

And there is a common thread between the two movies about trying to increase warning time. How are we doing on that?  I mean, what is the current warning time for a tornado? I know there are tornado watches and tornado warnings, and tornado warnings means there's activity that means a tornado is imminent or it's already on the ground. So how much lead time are people in various areas getting, and also, how are we getting the word out?  I know there used to be big tornado sirens that would go off. Are those still in operation?

CARL

Yeah, absolutely. You know, tornado sirens are in place across many, many parts of the country. Increasingly warnings are going out via phone, people get their local warnings on their phone, I think most people have their phones set that way. And then hopefully they you know, turn to us or their local meteorologist to get more information about what's going on. Lead time on average, I think it's about 20 minutes, but obviously there going to be some cases where things spin up, you know, more quickly than that. And it's all about initially seeing this rotation, that mesocyclone developing in the mid-levels or mid-to-low levels of the storm, because that's the first thing that shows up. Sometimes it develops so well on radar that you can actually see what's called a tornado vortex signature, which is a much, much smaller feature, usually, relative to the mesocyclone, although there are cases where you know when you've got a very large tornado that the whole thing kind of fuses and it's just one large circulation that's showing up on radar. But usually, we've got a really good idea if there's a very well-developed tornado that's occurring, it's very rare that you can't see that clearly on radar, and I can tell you from, you know, doing this for now 33 years that I can look at the radar pretty quickly and make a sort of snap judgment about, you know, OK, well, that looks like it could do something, or oh, that's there's no question. I mean, I've had that happen to me on the air, where I can think of some cases in recent memory - Rolling Fork in Mississippi - where I'm just looking at it, and I'm saying, “This is it, folks, now is the time to, don't try to figure out if it's coming, none of that, get to the most interior room right now.” And sure enough, there was a terrible tornado. So, you know, we do have a pretty good idea of what's coming, especially when it's on the higher end. You know, it's very rare that you get a really strong tornado and that slips by you, in terms of the National Weather Service forecasters who are manning the radar. I also do want to point out, that was one of the sort of glaring errors in in the movie.For the most part they did a really good job with the science, you know they went most of the way there, but there are just a few little things that weren't quite right. But one of the big ones to me was, you know, these two seasoned chasers-slash-scientists that are at the rodeo. And you know, somehow this massive tornado comes out of the blackness and towards them. And they had no idea that it was coming. That just wouldn't happen. First of all, there would have been a warning long before that, and the sirens would have been on, and it just doesn't happen that you get a massive tornado like that and there there's no warning whatsoever. So that that was one of the things that that strained credibility in a bigger way with that movie.

JOHN

Yeah, Don and I were really laughing at that point. We said, oh, sure, they're sitting there and there's no warning. And now there's a tornado. I mean, they must really have been rodeo fans and not paying attention to the air, which they're supposed to be so sensitive to. Right. You know, changes in the air.

CARL

They have to be the worst storm chasers in the history of mankind!

DON

Yeah, but that Glen Powell sure has nice hair!

JOHN

I'm telling you! Never mussed!

Also, there was no “We got cows” in this movie, which is too bad. That's the famous line from the first one, which has gone down in infamy.

(FROM “TWISTER,” 1996)

JO (Helen Hunt)

Cow!

MELISSA (Jami Gertz)

I gotta go, Julia. We got cows.

JO (Helen Hunt)

Another cow!

BILL (Bill Paxton)

Actually, I think that was the same one.

JOHN

So, alright. Two of the last three years in my area of Central New Jersey, which is not famous for tornadoes - in fact, we get them very seldom - but two of the last three years, we've gotten very serious ones. And three years ago, we got a tornado that came up Route One, and luckily, we were watching The Weather Channel when y'all said into the camera, “Guys, we're counting about 9 to 13 smaller tornadoes and a big one. So if you're anywhere near Route One, get your basement,” which we definitely did. And we heard that sucker going up Route One. We could hear it from our house. That's the closest I've ever been. I've never seen the tornado. And so, my question to you is, would you have anything to say about the relationship between climate change and tornadoes, where they occur, their frequency? Are we seeing more? Are we seeing a change because the world is changing?

CARL

Yeah. You know, in climate science there's this, there's the science of attribution, which is how well we understand how something should be affected by climate change. And then there's detection, which is whether or not we can demonstrate that a change has occurred relative to what's happened in the past. The problem with severe weather is, the detection issue is really tricky, because we don't have amazing records of what's happened in the past. There's this idea of what's called tornado inflation. The tornado numbers increasing because there are more people that are able to see these and so more reporting is going on. That having been said, there have been some studies that are showing some different things. One is that we're probably seeing an increase, and we're projected to see an increase in the number of days that are favorable for severe weather, which makes a lot of sense. Because the storms feed on warm and humid air, so if there's more of it, then it's conceivable that you could get more severe weather. There's been some research on tornado power, on the power of tornadoes increasing, on the likelihood that outbreaks are occurring more often. Also, you know, we we're seeing a shifting in some of the belts, you know, to some extent away from the High Plains, where it's getting a little bit drier on average, and more towards the Mississippi Valley and parts of the mid-South. And we're also seeing an increase in tornado activity in the cooler months along the Gulf Coast, which also makes sense because, you know, 40 years ago, December rolls around and, you know, cold air is blasting down from the north, and it has shut off the Gulf of Mexico. And you don't have to think about tornadoes again until March. Well, now that that cold air kind of ebbs and flows, and then you've got a very warm Gulf. And so, when you do get winds out of the South, boom, all of a sudden, you're back into a situation where you've got enough warm and human air, enough buoyancy to support tornadoes. But on top of that, you tend to have really strong parent storms, and very strong upper winds in wintertime because they're feeding on the contrast between cold and warm. So, those very strong upper winds are a key ingredient for tornado days. So, when you have these vigorous systems coming across, you know, say the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama, Northwest Florida in the wintertime, and you got just enough moisture available, well you can have, you can easily get tornadoes in that case. So that's something that we're also seeing an increase in. So yes, there are some areas where there does appear to be a change in the frequency of tornado activity or the geography of tornado activity, but it's not as easy to show, to demonstrate as with, for example, I don't know, obviously heat waves or very heavy rain.

DON

One of the things that we should point out is that you often hear that a tornado is an EF1, or an EF 2, or up to five, and that’s the rate of the power of the tornado. But unfortunately, that that's one of the things about tornadoes that always got to me, and that is that the scale we used to determine how big and gigantic and powerful a tornado is, is the amount of destruction it leaves behind, and that is what those scales are based on. You go and you look at the destruction and figure out, in arrears, how big it was and how high the winds were. So again, that that tells me that we're not any closer to really doing anything about protecting people from tornadoes other than get out of the way when it's coming.

CARL

You know, that that damage scale was developed several years ago, that enhanced Fujita scale. And you know what they did is they got engineers to look at this. They have, you know, many different what are called damage indicators. And these damage indicators are based on the strength of structures. You know, in some cases it's going to be sort of universal. It's going to be, you know, based on what happens to trees. You know, for example, if trees are debarked or if only a trunk is left, then that's, you know, pretty consistently the sign of a very high-end tornado. But then it's also about the strength of structures. Obviously, you know, manufactured homes are not going to do as well, but there are other types of masonry versus brick versus siding, whether or not there were clips or anything to hold the structures together. These are all things that they look at to determine the strength of tornadoes after the fact, but what's really interesting is that the size and power don't have a necessarily that kind of a relationship. Certainly there are cases where you have a very large, extremely dangerous tornado. But there are also very large, weaker tornadoes, especially when they're starting to spin down, we've still got this broad area of winds that's going around, but it's not necessarily that strong. And conversely, you can have what is called a “drill bit” tornado. There was an amazing video of one, I think it was in in Minnesota, in the last few years, where it's just this tiny little thing that might have been, I don't know, 30 feet across, and it's spinning so fast, it's so powerful. And you know, those can have incredible wind speeds. Howie Bluestein once said that little spins like that might be supersonic. So, you know, there's not always a relationship between size and intensity. And the other thing is there are plenty of cases where you have very intense tornadoes that occur in a wheatfield, but you don't have anything to measure the intensity of the wind in terms of, you know, structural or tree damage. So, you never know. Unless you had a Doppler radar right on the storm, there was no way to know what the wind speed is, actually. So, yeah, it's an imperfect system as it stands right now, but we are getting a better understanding of how to protect ourselves. And you know, one of the biggest points of failure in a structure is the roof. Once the roof goes, and then you start to drive wind driven rain into a structure, it's so much easier for the walls to fail at that point. And that's why there's been a lot of work, there are a number of institutes that have done, you know, really great work on how to reinforce homes. And that can include clips that attach the roof to the walls and make it much more difficult for the roof to come off. And in fact, in Hurricane Michael, which hit Panama City and I think damaged or destroyed something like 85% of the structures there, there were five homes that were built by Habitat for Humanity, and they were built to the highest standard of fortification, and they actually had these long pins that connected the roof through the walls to the foundation, so the roof was bolted to the foundation. And then they had some other things as well. And the homes were basically unscathed, they had almost no damage among the five homes that were in that storm. It was pretty amazing. So, we can build to a much higher standard, but it's going to take a lot of time to do that.

JOHN

Do we want to go around and give our zero to 10 rating of Twisters as a movie? I can start.

DON

Go ahead, John.

JOHN

I can say that as a summer blockbuster, that doesn't take any brains, just - you want to go in and have a rip-snorting time - I'd give it an 8 1/2. I think, you know, it was fun. As an intense psychological penetrating insight into the reality of human existence, I would give it some sort of decimal just above 0. It's about as deep as a teacup, but you know, I think we're hearing today that, as for the science, it wasn't so bad in many cases and that might be a reason to go see it. It has some surprises, in that way, and it's there for the special effects. But the science does, it certainly made us ask you some questions that were at least half-informed, right?

CARL

Yeah. I agree with your assessment completely. I think they were pretty good on the science. Just, you know, not 100% of the way there. And yeah, I mean it's, you know, that's the point of the movie. is for there to be summer fun. But, but yeah, you're right, it wasn't a deep penetrating exposition of any kind. Yeah, but you know, that's half the fun of going to the movies, I guess.

DON

Yeah. It was a good way to burn off a box of popcorn and a nice soda. And again, Glen Powell's hair, perfect throughout the whole thing. What can I say? I mean for a storm chaser, that guy dresses really pretty nicely.

JOHN

And the title of that book again about Tim Samaras, which I recommend to everyone. It’s beautifully written and very informative about how tornadoes form. Very beautifully done. By Brantley Hargrove. It's called The Man Who Caught The Storm. And very much recommended

DON

And as long as we're recommending, that EF scale, that Fujita scale, is named after a Doctor Fujita, who studied tornadoes for a long, long time and actually came up with the scale. And if you want to learn more about that, PBS has a really nice documentary on that. So if you're, if you're one of those PBS Passport people, and you can go in and look at their old videos, go looking for Doctor Fujita. Because it's a really interesting documentary on how he chased down how tornadoes formed. He was one of the first ones to really do in depth research into that. And Carl, thanks for being on the show today and taking us through what happened in both Twisters and what happens in real life. Hopefully you guys in Atlanta are safe, and we'll try to stay safe up here from the tornado that pops up from now and then.

CARL

Absolutely! Thank you so much for having me once again.