‘Twisters’ gets high marks for science, but with some questionable spins, tornado experts say

That the tornadoes in Twisters came with a dearth of warnings bothered Richard Smith. This was a somewhat personal matter.

Smith is the warning coordinator meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla., and all of those things in the movie touched down on his turf. Rest assured, he said, in real life, watches and warnings would have been issued.

What’s more, he questioned the movie’s portrayal of those who live in an international nexus of tornadoes and are more than well-acquainted with them. “Oklahomans seemed kind of freaked out and didn’t know what to do,” he said.

Despite those caveats, and a major plot element that tornado specialists found especially troubling, he and other meteorologists gave Twisters — the summer blockbuster released 28 years after the original Twister — a decent grade for scientific accuracy, at least a solid B.

Smith acknowledged a certain bias. Meteorologists at the Norman complex, the NOAA mayhem center that also houses the Storm Prediction Center and National Severe Storms Laboratory, were heavily involved in schooling the cast and crew members.

» READ MORE: Norman, Okla., is a national center for storm-mayhem forecasting

Said Smith, who conducted a class for 18 of them in May 2023 and even made a cameo in the movie, “They came in very motivated and very interested,” particularly Daisy Edgar-Jones.

Edgar-Jones, who plays Oklahoma native and storm-chaser Kate Carter, pursues a quixotic dream aiming to snuff out tornadoes by launching a chemical concoction into their vortices. Don Quijote would have had better luck against windmills, say real tornado specialists. After her boyfriend and two others are killed during a chase, she takes a job with NOAA in New York working at a weather service office. We’ll get back to that.

She is later lured back to chasing during a major outbreak in Oklahoma, and during a frantic week of tornado activity, she is joined by Glen Powell, an ex-rodeo star turned chaser named Tyler Owens, who entices her to resume the pursuit of tornado-snuffing.

Somehow, embedded in the ensuing maelstroms is the story of a kissless love triangle. (Perhaps those 200 mph winds killed the mood.)

Although for the most part the tornadic winds were remarkably kind to Edgar-Jones’ makeup (25 people were listed on the makeup staff) and Powell’s coiffure, the depictions of what happens on the ground when a monster twister spins a path of destruction impressed Kevin Kelleher, former deputy director of the storms laboratory.

“I think they were really accurate,” said Kelleher, who worked with the writers for over two years, “perhaps a little exaggerated.” Kelleher, now retired, also was involved with the original Twister.

The sequel was superior to the original meteorologically, Smith said: “The terminology, the jargon is much more spot on. The homework, I think, paid off.”

He cited a scene in Twisters in which a frighteningly fiery Doppler radar image “reflects pretty accurately what stage the storm is in,” he said.

However, a Doppler reference was the source of a gaffe early in the movie. “There were a couple of hiccups,” said Kelleher.

» READ MORE: It was Ted Fujita who figured out how to rank the strength of tornadoes by analyzing photos

During a morning scene, a chaser remarks, “The Doppler doesn’t show a storm until this afternoon.”

That line resulted in a high “cringe” factor among meteorologists, said Smith. Doppler detects. It is not in the prediction business. It can pick up tornado signatures in storms, maybe 15 to 20 minutes in advance, that set off warnings.

Smith is certain that in the climatic scene in which Kate and Tyler are attending a rodeo interrupted by a monster tornado, warnings would have been issued before all the iPhone alarms went off. “That rodeo would have been canceled,” he said. “But then you’d have no movie.”

After the disasters, with no credentials whatsoever, Kate, Tyler, and other folks have free access to disaster sites ostensibly to lend helping hands. In reality, access would be strictly limited for safety reasons — think live wires, weakened building materials, and looting. “They’re locked down pretty tight,” said Smith.

» READ MORE: Forty years ago, a deadly tornado struck Pennsylvania. Could it happen again?

As for Kate’s NOAA career as a weather service forecast office in Manhattan, a scene in which Smith appears, NOAA has no such office in New York City. It’s on Long Island.

Kate and Tyler’s scheme to snuff out tornadoes by nuking them with mass quantities of water-absorbing sodium polyacrylate and silver iodide, which is used in cloud-seeding, was a source of considerable concern among the scientists.

“Tornadoes and the storms that form them are massive, impossibly complex systems that contain unfathomable amounts of energy,” Sean Waugh, research meteorologist with the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory, says in a YouTube video.

Even if such an antidote existed, said Waugh, “the side effects of those chemicals or forces are unknown and could likely cause as much or even more damage as the tornadoes themselves.”

But in consulting with the script writers, Kelleher said he was told that including that plot element was “nonnegotiable.”

So he worked with the writers to come up with a “theoretical” scenario in which it might have been effective.

After the tornado comes in contact with an oil refinery and mutates into a fire-breathing EF5, Kate launches the concoction into the twister, and it dissipates.

“That was my get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Kelleher. In the movie, the explosion rains doubt on whether it was Kate’s and Tyler’s genius or the encounter with the refinery that was the twister’s undoing, a plot element Kelleher suggested. “They did keep that in there, and I was happy about that,” he said.

Harold E. Brooks, senior research scientist at the storms laboratory, said he would have been more comfortable if the script would have declared the experiment an outright failure. “I’m scared to death that people would try to do that stuff,” he said.

Director Lee Isaac Chung has come under fire for the movie’s failure to address climate change. He has said his intention was not to save the world. “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented,” he said in a CNN interview.

How a warming planet is affecting tornadoes is one of climate change’s many uncertainties, say NOAA researchers.

» READ MORE: Tornado counts have increased in Pennsylvania

While the numbers of tornadoes with winds of at least 80 mph haven’t changed much, they are occurring on fewer days, but the numbers of days with major outbreaks have increased, NOAA says. More are occurring in fall and winter, but fewer in spring and summer.

NOAA’s upshot: “So far, the majority of research stops short of connecting historical changes in tornado behavior to a warming climate.”

All scientific quibbles aside, said Smith of Twisters: “It’s a movie.

“It was a lot of fun.”