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The Science Behind Twisters: Super-Tornadoes & Extreme Weather Explained
Extreme weather is more than just a blockbuster narrative device.
This summer moviegoers returned to tornado alley for a rematch against the weather in Twisters, a standalone sequel to the similarly named 1996 film Twister. Back in ‘96 a team of storm chasers set out to catch up with an F5 tornado and drop an array of sensors inside it. Now, it’s 30 years later and a new generation of storm chasers are taking cutting edge technologies out on the road and into the skies.
This time, the storms are bigger, badder, and more deadly. Of course, sequels always like to ramp up the action but an uptick in the frequency and severity of tornadoes is no fictional invention. More frequent and more powerful extreme weather events are an unfortunate real-world consequence of climate change.
What is Extreme Weather?
An extreme weather event is any time that weather, climate, or environmental conditions reach or surpass their ordinary thresholds. Historical records give us the upper and lower thresholds, and anytime the weather gets within 5 percent to 10 percent of those thresholds, or exceeds them, that’s an extreme weather event. Importantly, whether an event is extreme depends on its locality. Two weeks of temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit might not be extreme for Phoenix, Arizona, but it is for Siberia. Location matters.
Extreme weather can manifest in the form of heat waves, freezes, droughts, floods, tornadoes, tropical storms, cyclones, and more, all of which are impacted by a warming world. While individual events are usually the result of many factors, climate research indicates that human-caused climate change is making extreme weather events more common, longer lasting, larger in scale, and more severe over all.
Extreme heat waves are among the most deadly extreme weather events in recent history. Of all the weather related deaths in Europe from 1970 to 2019, 80 percent were caused by heat waves in 2003 and 2010.
In the meantime, rising temperatures are driving an increase in precipitation globally. That’s because the warmer the air is, the more water it’s able to hold. For every degree Celsius of warming, the air’s water storage capability increases 7 percent, resulting in stronger storms and more of them.
What is the Cost of Extreme Weather?
One way of tracking extreme weather events is in the number of billion dollar disasters. Since 1980, there have been 400 extreme weather events in the United States, each with a price tag of over a billion dollars. The total cost of those events is over $2.785 trillion. Globally, extreme weather events have racked up a bill of over $2 trillion in just the last decade.
The situation is rough and poised to get rougher. The overall average rate of billion dollar disasters between 1980 and 2023 is 8.5 events per year. The average from 2019 to 2023, the five most recent years of complete data, came in at 20.4 extreme weather events per year. We’ve already had 24 extreme weather events in 2024 and the year isn’t over yet. Those events included 17 severe storms, 4 tropical cyclones, 1 wildfire, and 2 winter storms.
We prefer our extreme weather on the big screen, catch Twisters streaming on Peacock November 15.
