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Is anything like this even remotely plausible?
hey dont email her with your ideas!
I thought the plot was pretty good, there were a lot of good action sequences.
Which she wasnt, but I knew that going in.
From a scientist, there were ups and downs.
I have to give them props because I know they did their research.
They made a lot of references to certain parameters and environmental conditions.
Outflow and storm interactions and the cap those are all science-y things that we look for.
Theres some legitimacy to the technology, particularly with Javis phased-array radar, the triple-radar data pipe.
That is something that scientists have been trying to accomplish for years, with very minimal success.
The fantasy part is theres no way we would ever be getting within 300 meters of a tornado.
Youd lose an instrument every single time.
Its challenging to set up from the backside of the storm as a storm is moving away from you.
You cant really get yourself in position without the storm basically mowing you over first.
But the questions then are, how does that strong rotation at the ground get there?
Where does it come from?
What was special about that one particular storm?
Those are kind of the details that are still unknown.
While were definitely further ahead now than we were even ten years ago, the details still elude us.
And part of the reason for that is because we dont have sufficient observations of the process.
The radar is basically like an X-ray for the tornado.
With multiple radars looking from different angles, you’re free to triangulate the three-dimensional wind field.
It is important to know the details of that temperature profile.
Where is the air cold?
Whats the boundary between the cold, storm-generated air versus the environment?
We need three-dimensional thermodynamic data to help put the nuances of the storm into context.
As far as I know, that technology doesnt exist.
I imagine that people dont do that in real life.
But is it based on anything?Hypothetically speaking, it might be sort of possible.
But the amount of material …
I mean, when you think about a tornado, there are kilotons of moisture.
It is heavy, heavy-duty.
Were not talking about a babys diaper being good enough.
I appreciate what the writers were trying to do.
They wanted something with a big bang, literally and figuratively, and that was the direction they went.
So that, to me, is the scariest part of the whole story line.
Or lets build this humongous wall across the central plains so that tornadoes run into it and die.
If we disrupt or destroy it, what are the side effects of that?
What are we going to be inducing downstream that we arent anticipating?
There are individuals that have vehicles equipped with spikes like that.
We didnt have these big corkscrew augers, buthis vehicle is equipped with spikes.
Sean and I go back like 20 years.
I was with him on one of the first chases where he actually implemented this idea.
Theyd chop your leg off if you were in the wrong spot.
I hesitate to say theyre safe, but your vehicle probably wont roll in some of these lower-end tornadoes.
The biggest problem is not so much the winds, but whats inside the tornado.
That tornado is picking up trees and houses and farm material.
If something like that whacks you at 200 miles an hour, your vehicles rolling no matter what.
Theres been some back-and-forth over whether the movie should havementioned climate change.
Can you fill me in on the current scientific consensus?Hes absolutely right.
The science just isnt there.
Climate is long-term, hundreds, thousands of years, and regional climate conditions are hundreds of miles wide.
So theyre much smaller, and much shorter-lived.
Tornado generation is linked to small-scale processes within the storms themselves that are not necessarily climate-related.
Most likely the latter.
Over the past ten years, these states are seeing an increase in environments that are favorable for tornadoes.
What that means is that were seeing this shift away from the central plains.
Is that driven by climate change?
Possibly, because those larger-scale environments are climatologically linked.
Were also seeing more tornadoes earlier in the year.
Wintertime tornado outbreaks appear to be on the rise while summertime tornadoes appear to be on the decline.
We hada tornado in Brooklyna while back.
So peoples lives are still impacted.
Trees still come down.
Peoples houses are still damaged.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
