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What Twisters gets right — and wrong — about tornado science

Nature talks to tornado specialists and scientific advisers for the new disaster film about how it stacks up.
  1. Alexandra Witze
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A scene from the film "Twisters" showing a truck in front of a tornado with power lines coming down nearby.

In this still from the 2024 film Twisters, a tornado wreaks havoc in Oklahoma. Credit: Landmark Media/Alamy

When Hollywood producers showed up a few years ago at Sean Waugh’s office, he couldn’t wait to show them his thunderstorm-tracking equipment. Waugh, a meteorologist at the US National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, is a big fan of the 1996 film Twister, which stars Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as leaders of a tornado-chasing research team. And now, Hollywood was asking Waugh his opinion on how the science in the next film in the Twister franchise should look.

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Nature 631, 722 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02276-x

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 12 July 2024: An earlier version of this story said that the US National Weather Service uses an advanced technology called phased array radar. Is it the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

References

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