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In ‘Twisters’ Storm Chasers want to disrupt a tornado. Is that possible?

Sean Waugh holds a laptop with green, red and yellow weather radar spinning as his driver speeds down an Oklahoma highway in their government-issued truck. The vehicle carries 50 gallons of fuel, allowing them to chase storms all day long. A rectangular cage with metal mesh covers the truck in an attempt to protect the team from hail. Weather instruments hanging from the front of the hail cage resemble a rhinoceros horn running into a storm.

The truck, called Probe One, points in one direction, and a companion, Probe Two, points in another. Tall grass flows like ocean waves, and the stop sign at an intersection wobbles. The sky is dark gray with a hint of green. Lightning flashes on all sides.

The radio crackles. “Probe One, do you want us to go?”

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“Yes, go now,” said Waugh, a researcher at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

As they disappear into the mist, another storm chaser appears: Reed Timmer, who has a large social media following, riding ahead in one of his tank-like trucks, the Dominator.

It’s just the scientist, the YouTube star, and a lonely farm.

Waugh breaks the silence: “Tornado, tornado right in front of us. Do you see it?”

There it is, a faint gray swirl, like a twirling ballerina, emerging from the rain curtain for a few fleeting seconds. The Dominator’s roar can be heard above the thunder as it careens down a muddy dirt road. A satellite tornado—one forming outside the central circulation—is 100 yards away.

With a little dramatization and some special effects, it could be a scene in the new movie “Twisters.” The film is a sequel to “Twister,” which holds a special place in Waugh’s heart — as it does for many who study tornadoes. The release of “Twister” in 1996 ushered in a new era of storm chasing, transforming what had once been a solitary scientific endeavor into something that occasionally resembled a circus, attracting not just researchers but livestreamers, storm spotters, tour buses and anyone willing to buy a $10 radar app to whisk them away to the action.

Despite all its impact, however, “Twister” was riddled with scientific missteps that Waugh and his fellow scientists were determined to avoid.

Kevin Kelleher, a semi-retired researcher who was a part-time consultant on the original and served as an advisor for two years on Twisters, said the filmmakers, including executive producers Steven Spielberg and Ashley Jay Sandberg and director Lee Isaac Chung, “were all very interested in getting the basic science right.”

Did they succeed?

The premise of “Twisters” is an attempt to disrupt or kill a tornado — to tame it, as one of the main characters, Kate Conner, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, puts it. Doing that for real would be “quite a leap,” Kelleher says, but one that is theoretically, be possible.

The characters in the film do this by spraying chemicals into a storm, which absorb and cool the water the tornado is using as fuel, in an attempt to stop the storm before it hits a crowded movie theater. Waugh sees nature suffocating itself with cold air like this all the time. But the idea that humans are directly causing this is still a Hollywood invention.

It’s mainly a problem of scale.

According to Waugh, Kelleher and scientists at the National Severe Storms Laboratory sat down and did some quick calculations. “They thought, OK, if you could throw a chemical into the storm, that would essentially create enough precipitation to force a downdraft cold enough to kill the tornado. How much would that cost?”

They did the math and came up with a number, and that led to the driving plot of the film: getting enough of this chemical.

In real life, it would take up to 30 tons of material to make a meaningful change in an environment as powerful as a tornado. “It’s not physically possible,” Waugh said. And even if it were, Kelleher said, it would take 15 to 20 minutes for the chemicals to be absorbed and the rain to solidify.

In the Hollywood version, scientists pack the chemicals into a small trailer. And when it’s fired into the storm, the effects are visible within seconds. But the creative liberties don’t bother Kelleher. “It’s not a documentary,” he said. “It’s for fun.”

“Just like the first one,” Kelleher said. “I expect there will be people who want to challenge the storyline, and that’s fine, but I don’t think anyone is going to stand up and say, this is 100% how the world works.”

In a storm, Waugh stands tall, like a general in the middle of a battle. Despite the chaos, nothing seems to make him flinch. Calmly, but hurriedly, with his long stride, he takes a few steps toward the truck and says it’s time to go.

“It literally goes half a mile to a mile down the road,” he said. “I guarantee you it’s in there.”

Unlike in the film, Waugh doesn’t drive straight into a tornado. Instead, he drives west in Probe One, ahead of the tornado, while Probe Two drives east. They both hold their positions as the tornado passes between them, then drive behind it as it swirls past them. The maneuver leaves Probe One in the most precarious position possible — between the tornado and the dangerous wind, hail, and rain of the downdraft.

The trucks are part of a larger research group called Lift, which stands for low-level internal flows in tornadoes. The team, made up of scientists from the National Storm Lab and academics from schools like Texas Tech, is trying to gather information from the damage layer of tornadoes (the bottom 65 feet (20 meters) to the ground), an area where it hasn’t been routinely collected.

The work is no different from what the fictional team does in the movie. In the movie, three trucks that look a lot like Probe One and Probe Two are nicknamed Tin Man, Lion, and Scarecrow. They attempt to drop portable phased radar close to the tornado, triangulate around it, and gather data from the three-dimensional winds that occur.

The storm chaser trucks in the film are essentially the same setups used by the real scientists. That’s because Waugh built them in his garage. “I don’t mean I told them how to build them — I built the equipment for the movie myself,” he said. (Waugh makes a cameo in “Twisters,” trudging around a gas station in the background in one scene.)

In real life, as in the movies, it can be tricky to time and execute every person and instrument around a storm. And while more agile mobile radar and lidar are available, they still can’t be deployed from the back of a truck and left on the ground close to a tornado’s path, as they are in the movies. But maybe someday.

“We’re going to see the technology move away from science fiction and more into reality, where we can make these kinds of things happen,” Waugh said.

Using slightly different (and bigger) technology, the nonfiction team is essentially trying to answer the same question that neither film has yet solved: How is a tornado formed?

Like “Twisters,” “Twister” was based on real research, but it pushed the boundaries of technology. In that first film, scientists had a plan to send sensors into a tornado to take measurements and hopefully collect enough data to predict when a tornado would form and how it would behave.

But scientists still can’t do this nearly thirty years later.

“The technology just isn’t there,” Waugh said. “It’s not small enough. You can’t make it light enough to fly like that.” But like other elements of the films, Kelleher and Waugh believe the sensors could theoretically be made, though they question whether the cost would be worth it. The real future, they say, is getting radars closer to the base of a tornado to create a 3-D view.

Since “Twister,” scientists have gained a fairly good understanding of how a tornado’s rotation begins and what its basic ingredients are. This has steadily improved warning times. The more we understand about how a tornado forms, the earlier and more accurate warnings can be.

“You hear the first movie, and you hear this movie saying, ‘What we do can save lives,’ or ‘What we do can make a difference,'” said Rick Smith, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla. (He’s also an extra in the film, playing a service member, and he gave a meteorology lesson to the actors.)

“And it’s true. I mean, it’s absolutely true with this tornado research.”

Every meteorologist working on “Twisters” has asked themselves a deeper question: Even if we could tame a tornado, should we?

“Influencing the weather is a very tricky thing because we don’t know what the consequences will be,” Waugh said.

Every bit of weather, every cloud, every tornado, hurricane, flash flood, everything, he said, is a balancing act of the planet trying to balance the energy imbalances between the poles and the equator. If that process is disrupted, what happens? Because that energy is going somewhere. And it may not be pretty when it does.

“Tornadoes happen for a reason. Thunderstorms happen for a reason,” Smith said. “It’s like ‘Jurassic Park’ — you start messing with the way nature is supposed to work, and then what?”

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