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Abstract
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When Hollywood producers showed up a few years ago at Sean Waugh's office, he couldn't wait to show them his thunderstorm-tracking equipment. Waugh, a meteorologist at the US National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, is a big fan of the 1996 film Twister, which stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as leaders of a tornado-chasing research team. And now, Hollywood was asking Waugh his opinion on how the science in the next film in the Twister franchise should look.
On 17 July, when the film is released internationally, the world will see how Waugh's recommendations panned out. Like its predecessor, the new Twisters film focuses on characters who are storm chasers: Daisy Edgar-Jones plays a researcher traumatized by past weather disasters and Glen Powell a social-media star racing for footage of the biggest and baddest tornadoes. But science has an even bigger role in the plot of the new film than it had in the original, say Waugh and other researchers who worked as consultants for Twisters. It not only shows advanced radar data and highlights links between climate change and tornadoes, "it's an incredible opportunity to inspire the next generation of scientists", Waugh says.
Getting the science right
Meteorologists love to nitpick the original Twister film's scientific errors. Although it drew inspiration from extreme-weather researchers at the Norman lab, it placed entertainment above scientific accuracy, scientists say. For instance, researchers often point sarcastically to scenes that used radar readings of clear skies, when audiences were supposed to be looking at data from a tornado's swirling heart.
The new film is much more accurate, says Kevin Kelleher, a meteorologist who is retired from the Norman lab and consulted on both Twister films. For the 2024 version, "if they could change things and make it a bit more scientifically correct, they did", he says. Kelleher credits...
Language: en |