Sorry Twisters, Science Says We Probably Can’t Tame Tornadoes [CNET]

And the consequences could be dire if we did.

Humans have been fascinated with the idea of controlling nature for thousands of years. People all over the world have had their own rainmaking rituals, we’ve tried to develop technology to control the weather and there’s even a popular comic book character, aptly named Storm, who can bend the weather to her will. 

Bringing the weather to heel has been an idea humans have struggled with for years, and in the new film Twisters, we see this play out on the big screen. In the sequel to the 1996 disaster thriller film Twister, we follow Kate Cooper (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) as they try to disrupt a tornado.

Read more: Where to Stream Twister Before Watching Twisters

And doing so could save lives. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, about 80 people die and 1,500 people are injured every year by tornadoes. Tornadoes have also caused about $27.7 billion in damage so far this year, according to NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. 

The task of stopping a tornado is even more complicated than it sounds, and it didn’t sound particularly simple to begin with. I spoke with Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, who doesn’t think we will ever be able to safely disrupt a tornado. 

Here’s what we know about tornadoes, how people throughout the ages have tried to tame the weather and why we may never be able to stop tornadoes.

How are tornadoes formed?

NOAA defines a tornado as nature’s most violent storm, which has a rotating column of air above the ground that is usually attached to a thunderstorm. Tornadic winds can reach 300 miles per hour, and their damage paths can be one mile wide and 50 miles long. 

Scientists are still studying what exactly causes tornadoes, but many major tornadoes are spawned by supercell thunderstorms. These are massive storms that feed off updrafts — upward moving air — that are tilting and rotating. 

According to Paul Markowski, a meteorology professor at Penn State, these thunderstorms develop when warm, humid air near the ground is beneath a layer of cold air. Because warm air naturally moves in the direction of cooler air, these varying temperatures across different heights cause instability, which feeds the thunderstorm. Then, you need large changes of wind speed or direction at different heights — called wind shear. 

The rising, spinning, warm air, as well as falling cool air, causes a tornado to form.

Humanity has always tried to control the weather

Trying to disrupt, or even control, a tornado like in Twisters may sound far-fetched, but humanity has tried to control the weather for ages.

Native peoples from around the world have attempted to call forth storms and rain to end drought through rainmaking rituals for millenia. Native Americans in the southwestern United States, the San in southern Africa and Thai farmers — to name a few groups — all have their own rituals that are meant to draw forth the rain.

In the 20th century, the US government funded Project Stormfury, an experimental research program on hurricane modification. The thinking behind the project was that people could weaken hurricanes by flying a plane near a storm and dispensing silver iodide into it. This process is called cloud seeding. While Project Stormfury failed to alter hurricanes, cloud seeding is still used for other purposes today. 

According to the Desert Research Institute, cloud seeding makes it easier for a cloud to produce rain or snow. And the practice has been used in areas like Wyoming and Australia, where studies suggest it increased precipitation by 5% to 15%. 

But despite these studies and efforts, meddling with tornadoes probably isn’t a good idea.

Should we even try to disrupt tornadoes?

It’s hard to say whether disrupting, or altering, tornados is a good idea or not. That’s because it’s unclear what environmental function tornadoes serve.

“We don’t know what a tornado does in terms of, why is there a tornado?” Brooks said. “You’d like to think there’s some reason … that it’s addressing some sort of imbalance. We don’t know what that is.”

Tornadoes could help scatter seeds over large areas or clear away heavy vegetation to make way for new growth. They could also make new opportunities for certain species of wildlife to thrive. 

We do know that disrupting supercell thunderstorms, the storms that most commonly produce tornadoes, could be disastrous. That’s because these storms account for a significant amount of rainfall in parts of the Great Plains and areas with a lot of agriculture, according to a study published in the International Journal of Climatology.

“Supercells provide critical precipitation to the Wheat and Corn Belts, large expanses of [conterminous United States] pasture and rangeland, regional aquifers and several large river basins,” the study said. “Many areas in the central [conterminous US] receive upwards of 3%–6% of their annual and 5%–8% of their warm season precipitation from these storms.”

Reducing the rainfall in these regions could negatively impact crop growth and output, making food less accessible for many people across the world.

We’d probably need to disrupt a tornado first in order to learn how much they impact the environment, though, and we may never safely do that.

Why we may never tame tornadoes

I asked Brooks what’s stopping us from being able to safely disrupt a tornado, and he pointed to the massive amounts of energy they are churning through, as well as around them.

It’s helpful to remember that a tornado is a fairly small extension of a much larger and more powerful storm. 

“Tornadoes are processing like an atomic bomb a second of energy,” Brooks said. Despite that power, “they are a bird fart in the thunderstorm energy.”

He said that one thing that’s happening in the storm around a tornado is moisture in the air is being boiled, creating steam that rises. Then that steam is being cooled to create water again. And that is taking place all throughout the storm around the tornado.

“Think of it as a process over a cylinder that’s five miles across and maybe close to 10 miles high, moving at 100 miles an hour going up,” Brooks said.

Brooks said even if we did stop a tornado, the storm around it would likely just produce another tornado. In effect, stopping a tornado and not dealing with the storm around it is like chopping off the head of a hydra — another will reappear shortly.

“If it made a tornado a few minutes ago, it’ll be fine reproducing the tornado immediately,” Brooks said.

So we would have to counteract all that energy, and it’s not clear that we can do that safely at this time.

And no, we can’t bomb a tornado

From my time with Brooks, the most surprising thing he said was that he used to get messages suggesting we bomb tornados to stop them. He said it might work, but it could also make things significantly worse in any number of ways.

“My first thought is that’s going to accelerate upward, which will intensify the updraft, which will lead to more stretching,” he said. “[And that] will lead to intensification of the rotation.”

That’s if the bomb goes into the tornado vortex and detonates at the correct height. If it misses though, it could be just as devastating, if not moreso.

“I’m not sure the town that it hits, or the farm, or rancher’s land that gets hit would be enthusiastic,” Brooks said.

There isn’t a good way to safely test this idea, so we may never know if a bomb can disrupt a tornado, but again, the storm around the tornado would still be intact so another tornado could spin back up.

So we’ll never safely disrupt a tornado?

Maybe not. But the film could help spark an interest in meteorology that could lead to a breakthrough in the future. The original film, Twister, helped boost enrollment at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Meteorology, and Universal Studios gave a grant to OU that allowed the development of a mobile radar.

While the science in Twisters is still mostly science fiction, director Lee Isaac Chung told the Hollywood Reporter he hopes the film will help inspire people to get more involved in learning about, and caring for, the Earth.
“We want to inspire people to embrace the natural world,” he said. “That can go quite a long ways toward influencing people to make good choices in their relationship with nature, to study what’s happening on this Earth and to figure out how can we become better caretakers of the planet.”

You can see Twisters now in a theater near you.

For more on science, here’s how interdimensional travel, like in Apple TV’s Dark Matter, could work. You can also check out how NASA is using satellites to help fight wildfires.