Storm chasing has changed — a lot — since Twister

The original Twister (1996), a beloved cinematic touchstone, is a story about so many things: the wonder of nature, the dissolution of a romance, the aerodynamics of cows, the thrill of data collection, a trial balloon for the idea of Helen Hunt-as-sex-symbol, the perfection of Philip Seymour Hoffman as a dude’s rock dude, and the eternal question of whether or not weather can be vindictive. At the same time, it’s very much about one specific thing: the human obsession with tornadoes.

Their destructive power. Their unpredictability. Their elusiveness. What isn’t endlessly fascinating about a 300-mph, five-minute long wind storm capable of cataclysmic destruction? And because of that collective fascination with cyclones — and perhaps the human fascination with the nearly 30-year-old original movie and Hollywood’s love of a franchise — Universal is releasing a follow-up, Twisters, on July 19.

In honor of Twister and Twisters, I sought out an expert to further shed light on the human-tornado-Twister dynamic. Finding a tornado to interview was difficult, but I did speak to Dave Call, a storm chaser since the ’90s and professor at Ball State University’s geography and meteorology program. Call is currently writing a memoir about his storm chasing experience.

As Call explained to me, there are a lot of factors that have and haven’t changed storm chasing in the 28 years since Twister’s release, but the main thing to know is that while the chase to find them might be easier, the actual causes of tornadoes are still as unpredictable and mysterious as they’ve ever been.

To be clear, storm chasing is dangerous. The material in this story is for informational purposes only, and does not constitute professional advice.

Dave. I must know. Have you seen Twister? Did it have any significant impact on you and storm chasing?

I want to say it came out after my first or second year in college. So of course we had to go see it. And meteorology majors, my friends and I, enjoyed poking fun at some of the weather shenanigans that took place in the movie.

What were the “weather shenanigans” that you thought were funny?

This is more like insider baseball, but for starters: these crazy tornadoes. Tornadoes themselves are actually pretty rare. It’s also unusual how all these people could amazingly survive all these deadly tornadoes. Like, [if you’re in the middle of a tornado] the building’s not gonna get blown away from you. You’re gonna get flattened by the building or the cows and things like that.

You mentioned that you’ve been storm chasing unofficially since the ’90s — around when Twister first hit theaters — and officially at Ball State since 2008. Can you tell me about your experience?

When I came to Ball State, they asked if I could teach the storm chasing class that my predecessor developed. And I thought, sure, why not? I love to travel. I like the weather. And now I’ve done it 19 times, and we’ve covered close to 130,000 miles.

Are you and your class looking for tornadoes specifically?

We are looking for tornadoes, but tornadoes are random freaks of nature. Most tornadoes last less than five minutes. If you see a tornado, it’s obviously a big rush. It’s exciting and amazing. But I always have to tamp down expectations because if you go out there only to see tornadoes, you’re going to end up being very disappointed — we’re often at the mercy of the bigger weather pattern. In roughly about half of our trips, we’ve seen a tornado.

We’re also out there learning a lot more about how thunderstorms work, and students get a great chance to forecast and figure out what storms are going to do in a situation where stakes are relatively low. I’m also going to make sure we don’t, you know, get ourselves killed.

That’s a good goal! What’s the scariest experience you’ve had?

Several times we have been caught in torrential rain and visibility goes to near zero. Imagine the heaviest rain you’ve experienced, then double the intensity. Driving is dangerous and we have lost awareness of where the tornado may be.

But you asked for a specific moment, so here’s a story: In June 2012, we were in the Oklahoma panhandle. A rotating storm was to our northwest, so we went to the west to get a better look. As we approached, it developed a wall cloud — a precursor to a tornado — but also turned to the southeast. Suddenly we were in danger. Because the storm had turned, heavy rain was now behind us, and we couldn’t go back the way we came. In front of us was a rotating wall cloud! Our only option was to skirt the wall cloud as we went west to the next paved road south, into Texas. Those were some very tense minutes.

Do you have any safety tips?

Before going on our storm chasing trip, students must score over 80 percent on a safety quiz! Here are my five most important tips:

What’s been the biggest change in storm chasing since you’ve been storm chasing?

Technology has really made it much easier for anybody to go out and chase storms. Nowadays, anybody can go out with radar on their phone and try to position themselves to see a tornado. You could spend 10 to 15 minutes poking around online and learn enough about how supercell storms are structured to figure out how to chase one yourself.

I don’t know if chasing storms is really for me [Ed note: It isn’t.], but it sounds like it’s a matter of data and information.

If you went out storm chasing in the ’80s or early ’90s, it was all basically visual storm chasing. If you really wanted to know what was going on, you’d have to pop into a weather service office somewhere, or have somebody in an office somewhere that you could call into and ask what the weather looks like.

Then, I want to say it was in the 1990s, you started to be able to get some satellite feeds of weather. These were expensive and you needed special equipment, but at least now you could get radar information in your vehicle. You still might have to go to the Weather Service, or go to a library to find the internet to get weather data.

The first year I went out in 2008 [with Ball State], we had a satellite feed of weather information, and we actually stopped at the library several times to get weather information. Then the year after that, we went ahead and got a mobile hotspot and we could look at weather information on our laptop. But of course, the problem was that the cellphone network 15 years ago was sparse if you had the wrong carrier or you were in the wrong area. And keep in mind, a lot of times these storms are in pretty rural areas.

But in the last 15 years, the cellphone networks have greatly improved and you have all this stuff on your phone. The original software we were using back in the late ’90s, early 2000s — the startup cost to get into storm chasing could be pushing four figures. Well now, if you have a phone and you buy an app, you’re talking maybe $10. So it’s so much easier to get that radar information.

Are there any other game changers?

Navigation. In 2008, we were using paper maps. I mean, there’s that line in the Twister movie about rolling the maps. GPS has gotten better and you can immediately see where you are.

It sounds like tech is the great equalizer. Like anyone can do storm chasing and it’s super popular — maybe more popular than the time after the original movie. But it also doesn’t seem like there’s a strict “storm chaser” label anymore.

One thing I talked about early on in my book is about storm chasing in general and how there’s a lot of people that are out there observing storms and doing different things.

I mean, there’s weather researchers, and there’ll be some professors or research scientists who may be professors or government — it all gets a little confusing — but they’re out there. But then there’s also people like me that are teaching classes. There are journalists that are covering it as part of their job. There are weather spotters, and then just people doing it because they find it cool, like the people who hike to the tops of mountains or try to get to every country in the world.

I want to talk about those weather researchers. The original movie centered on storm chasers and the lack of data they had about tornadoes. Is that still the case some 30 years later? Are tornadoes still a big mystery to us? What questions do we still have about them?

I’m trying to give you an answer without going too far beyond what I know.

I’ll say this: We know a lot more about tornadoes and how they work. We know a lot more about how tornadoes form. But one of the challenges we still have is figuring out which thunderstorms will produce a tornado and which ones won’t.

By comparison, hurricanes don’t take us by surprise. We have giant satellites. And as we’ve seen with [Hurricane] Beryl, they may rapidly intensify or weaken but they occur over a relatively long period of time.

Tornadoes are so brief. We’re getting better at answering that question, but the challenge is that we’re getting to the edge of what we can easily measure. Being able to get the data we need to unlock them is hard because it’s a very tiny scale.

It sounds like trying to hit a moving target, while you yourself are moving too. It also sounds like a problem from the original movie: Tornadoes are still very unpredictable and getting immense amounts of data of this random, fleeting thing is very difficult.

Well, it’s the age-old mystery and question surrounding meteorology. So much of it all is in those subtle details. Which is ironic because in a sense, that’s the most important thing.

If the Greensburg tornado, which leveled the Kansas town in 2007, was three miles south, it would have just been another tornado. It would have been an intense one, but not [one that caused so much destruction].

Is that the reason why humans are still so crucial in meteorology and storm chasing?

A good example would be flying. Autopilot is great, but what about when it really matters: take-off, landing, or bad weather?

I hate to admit it, but a computer can do as good a forecast as I can and, many days out of the year, your weather app is gonna get you a reasonably good forecast. But the days when it matters — the days with tornadoes, the days when there’s a potential blizzard about to hit New York City, the days when there’s a hurricane that’s going to come ashore — those are the days when you need meteorologists.

We can see these things, these big ingredients coming together, and then downscaling all that to individual storms, and then individual tornadoes at specific times at specific locations. The devil is in the details.

In recent years, we’ve heard about the link between climate change and extreme weather. Does climate change have an effect on storm chasing or tornadoes?

To get thunderstorms, you need a bunch of different factors to come together. Climate change modifies some factors in favorable manners and unfavorable manners. How climate change may affect the number of storms, the intensity and the severity of storms, and the location of storms — those are all things we’re still trying to figure out.

There was just something that came out, I want to say it was in the last couple of months, a paper that suggested that tornadoes are shifting eastward in the country, out of the Plains and more into sort of the Mississippi Valley. That would actually make storm chasing a little harder.

This is where the research gets sort of messy because you’ve got a bunch of things all changing at once. But the fact is that if storms move out of the Great Plains, that would be bad for storm chasing because it’s much easier to chase when you have open landscapes with relatively few trees, few hills, and few people.

Anecdotally, there’s some talk among storm chasers that the seasons these days aren’t as good as they used to be, and I’m not going to speculate on whether that’s true or not. But yes, climate change may affect where storms occur and when they occur, and make it harder to chase storms.

The good analogy with climate change is that it’s sort of stacking the deck. I do an example with my students in class where I take a deck of cards, and I pull out a few of the black cards. Now guess what? When you start turning over cards, you get a lot more red cards.

So climate change isn’t necessarily directly related to the result. It’s not making you pull diamonds or hearts. But it’s changing the circumstances which can make pulling diamonds and hearts happen more frequently. That makes sense to me, a person who is not well-versed in meteorology.

More generally speaking, one of the great difficulties with climate change and figuring out how it affects weather is that weather itself is highly variable. If anything, the number of tornadoes in this country hasn’t really increased. In fact, the number has been decreasing in recent years. Is that because of climate change, or is that some broader cyclical pattern?

Teasing out climate change amidst all the noise makes it difficult to assess. But once we get more years and more data points, we can start to say these things more confidently.

My last question: Are you going to see Twisters, Dave?

Yes, I’m gonna go watch the movie. If nothing else, my students and everyone who knows me are going to ask my opinion of it.

Maybe journalists too!

Here’s my answer: I’ll do it for scientific purposes.