There's no scientific evidence out there
that something like that can really happen.
It would have to be a massive amount of fuel.
Hey, everybody, I'm meteorologist Cyrena Arnold,
and I've done icing and turbulence test flights
with NASA contractors,
installed weather stations on the Alaska tundra,
and was the director of the world-famous
Mount Washington Observatory.
Today, we're going to be looking at storm scenes
from TV and movies
and figuring out how real they are.
Reporter: Oh! Oh, my God.
Lisa, this tornado just came and erased the Hollywood sign.
Los Angeles isn't free of being hit by tornadoes.
They absolutely can have them.
In fact, since 1950,
there have been 42 recorded tornadoes in Los Angeles.
And in 1983, South LA took a direct hit
from a rather large tornado,
and several people were killed.
The chances of getting severe thunderstorms
can happen anywhere.
All 50 states of the United States
have recorded tornadoes in them.
We just happen to get a few more of them
in the Midwestern United States,
because the ingredients for them to happen
just are there a little bit more frequently.
Newscaster: What can you see? Is anyone hurt?
Reporter: I wouldn't be surprised,
there is so much damage ...
Obviously, if you're going to be part of a media crew,
you're going to want to capture
a little bit of what's going on.
You see the news helicopters flying right by the tornado,
which they do from time to time.
They'll follow tornadoes in news helicopters,
but they're not going to be very close to it,
and they're zooming in, I think, a little bit too.
Reporter: Wait, it looks like they joined
and formed one large tornado.
Two tornadoes merging into one.
And we do see some instances out storm chasing
where you could have a multiple-vortices tornado,
and that means that you actually have
smaller little tornadoes that make up a larger one.
And if the condensation in there,
meaning the moisture and the waterdrops that you see,
are visible only in those vortices
and not surrounding the whole tornado itself,
it can actually make it look
like there's more than one tornado
in one specific location.
Oh, my God!
One thing that movies always kind of get funny
is the background clouds
in the surrounding storm around the tornado.
How dark the sky is when there's a tornado occurring
actually depends a lot on your position with the storm.
If you're going to be on, say,
the northeast side of the tornado
and you're going to be under
the main part of the thunderstorm,
it's probably going to be really dark where you are.
But there are places where you can actually have
blue sky above you while watching a tornado.
Tornadoes typically occur
on the southwest side of thunderstorms,
and if you happen to be in that area
and, say, southeast of that southwest corner of the storm,
you could have beautiful weather above you
and see the sun shining on a tornado,
making the storm and the tornado
look white and not dark at all.
Man: It's unbelievable! It's huge!
I've never seen anything like ...
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what the meter was.
I'm guessing it was more like a seismograph-type thing
measuring the vibrations of the earth,
but that definitely wasn't an anemometer
measuring the wind speeds.
I'd have to rate this one probably, like,
a 6 or a 7.
I don't think a tornado would be strong enough
to pull creatures up out of the ocean.
There is an instance in Louisiana in 1947
where it did rain down fish on a small town,
because it was likely picked up by a tornado.
It's not going to end well for them.
They're going to be pulled up to higher elevations;
they could potentially freeze,
which isn't going to feel well;
and then they're going to be falling back
down to earth again and hitting the ground.
But you're talking things that are pretty small
and pretty light.
So, as the remnants of Hurricane Ida
actually passed over New York and New Jersey
just earlier this year,
there were some situations where there was a flood warning
and a tornado warning happening at the same time,
and a warning means that it's imminent,
that it's actually happening right now,
not that it's going to.
If I had to rate this from 1 to 10,
it's a solid 1.
Everybody underground, now!
Don't get in a car if there's a tornado.
It's a terrible idea.
Don't take safety in your car, please.
While we're storm chasing, we're usually out in our cars.
If you are in a safe place and you're not too close
and want to get out and take a look at it, you can,
but you want to try to stay fairly far away from them,
you know, half mile to a mile away,
and you always want to try to be
maybe on the southeast side.
That's usually, for most tornadoes, the way they move,
the safest place to be.
There was a really devastating situation
with a large tornado
where there were four storm chasers
killed in their vehicle
because the tornado changed direction very rapidly.
It grew rapidly. Its speed changed.
It was very unpredictable,
and it ended up killing four people
who were very knowledgeable about the weather.
If you're that close to it, you need to seek shelter.
You should be going to a basement, if you have one.
If you don't, try the lowest elevation
that you have in your home,
and try to make it an interior room as possible.
So an interior bathroom under the stairwell,
any of those places are really good, safe places in a storm.
Tornadoes at night are something that do happen a lot,
and they're almost impossible to see.
They're actually extremely dangerous.
Sometimes the only way you can see where they are
is because you're seeing flashes of lightning
reflect off the side of the tornado
or you're getting power flashes
that show you where it is.
Seeing the lightening right on the edges
of the tornadoes is a little more rare.
We've had, there've been some images captured
of lightning with tornadoes happening in close proximity,
but for the most part it doesn't.
Usually that's happening in a different part of the storm
than where the tornado is located.
So, a lot of people think that it's a pressure differential
that causes windows to break and things like that
in a storm or when there's a tornado,
and it's actually not.
There are some pressure differentials there,
and sometimes people can feel their ears pop
if they're in a house and a tornado passes over it,
but usually when you see things break like that
it's because of debris and high wind speeds.
Tornadoes can pick up debris and move it and throw it
beyond the distance of where that tornado was.
So you can have cars that end up in trees or in homes.
The static interference that you see on the TV
I think is something that was a lot more popular
before everything became digital.
Back then, you know, you could see some static
or sort of some disruption in the signal
as you have a big thunderstorm approaching.
May not necessarily mean that a tornado was there,
but you could definitely get some disruption of the signals
with a large, severe thunderstorm.
So, tornadoes are pretty mysterious
in that they're a very small area
of very, very high wind speeds.
And weaker tornadoes or smaller ones have wind speeds
around that 100-mile-an-hour- or-greater threshold,
but your very large EF4, EF5 tornadoes
can have wind speeds up to 300 miles an hour,
and that's really, really devastating.
Because you have such high wind speeds in a small area,
they can rather pick or choose
what they choose to destroy.
I've seen homes that are perfectly still and untouched
with just a roof ripped off.
So for it to be able to pull off just pieces
of this building that they're in and take those
but leave other parts of the building just fine
isn't uncommon.
If I had to rate this clip on accuracy, it's pretty good.
I'd give it, like, a 7.
That's a lot of tornadoes very close together.
I'd be running too if I saw that.
The only way you can have multiple tornadoes
by each other like that
is sometimes when you see a tornado on the ground
it can have a satellite tornado,
meaning a smaller one that's actually
a part of the same storm that is rotating around it,
but that small one is going to be tiny.
It's going to look more like a
waterspout type of a tornado going around there.
But they're really rare.
I've never seen one. A few meteorologists have.
Otherwise, if you're lucky enough to see
multiple storms lined up
producing tornadoes at the same time,
you might be able to see one from another,
but that's really a stretch.
To see them this close together
and see that many happening at one time
is just completely not possible, at all.
The best storm chase I've ever been on
was October 9 of 2001 in Cordell, Oklahoma.
We were out chasing,
and we saw seven different tornadoes that day,
which was phenomenal.
It was a really great chase,
and we're really fortunate enough
to see seven different tornadoes,
including one that was an F3.
Tornadoes are rated by the Fujita scale,
and now it's actually the enhanced Fujita scale,
because it was updated.
EF5 is the maximum that you can reach on the EF scale.
Tornadoes can absolutely hit large metropolitan areas
like you see in this clip here.
A lot of your tornadoes
are a couple football fields wide,
if that, but there are some big
record-breaking ones out there.
We've seen tornadoes up to a mile wide,
and there's even been a tornado
that's 2.6 miles wide across
that was reported in El Reno, Oklahoma.
A cold front can't be severe enough
to take an airplane out of the sky like that
or freeze the ocean in the way that you saw here.
There was an instance around Nantucket, actually,
in January of 2018
where temperatures got cold enough
where you actually could see some slush
on the top of the ocean.
So if it is cold enough,
you can get some ice that forms there,
but for it to freeze over instantaneously like that,
it's just not going to happen.
Cold fronts do move quickly.
They are something that we can see progress
across the country at various speeds,
and sometimes they can go 50, 60 miles an hour across.
But they just don't have that drastic
temperature change with them.
I have seen some cold fronts come across Oklahoma
where the backside of the cold front,
it was in the teens, and on the front side,
it was just close to 70 degrees.
That's a really substantial and record-breaking cold front.
But to see things, you know,
happen like you saw here in this clip,
where people are freezing
or water's freezing instantly,
it's just not possible for that to happen.
To be that extreme just isn't possible.
It'd have to get, like, a 2 from me.
Cold fronts are real, and they do exist.
They're not this extreme.
And there was a tornado,
but it was just a few too many of them.
The way this tornado does the damage to this farm
and to that building is actually pretty accurate.
Having a tornado that far away
actually pull someone up into it isn't realistic.
Very few people have ever been able to say
they've seen the inside of a tornado.
I don't know of anybody personally
who's been pulled up into a tornado inside their car
and has lived to tell about it.
There have been a lot of people
who have taken some glancing blows from tornadoes
or have been spun around on the ground in their car
while the tornado passes over,
but no instances of someone being pulled up in their car
into the tornado and then coming out the top of the storm.
There's no scientific evidence out there
that something like that can really happen.
It would have to be a massive amount of fuel.
You do see tornadoes that are made up of fire, though.
Actually, a lot of times when there are forest fires,
you get things called fire whirls,
which are like a dust devil,
and they can encompass flames
and actually be caused by the fire itself.
So that's the closest thing I can think of
to what you saw here.
They looked a little bit more realistic
than when you see in some other movies,
but coming out up the top of the tornado
and stuff like that, it's a little bit of a stretch.
I'd give it, like, a 5.
Was he hanging on by his tongue?
Producer: Yeah, I believe so.
OK.
You can take your weight in pounds, cut that in half,
and that'll be the speed in miles per hour
that you'll be able to walk around, max,
without getting blown over.
So if you weigh 150 pounds,
it's going to be about 75-mile-an-hour winds
are going to be the max
that you're going to stay standing for.
They're showing people being pulled up and sucked up.
So, typically if you think about, say,
a skydiver falling out of an airplane
and they're free-falling,
they reach what's called terminal velocity.
That's around 120 to 125 miles an hour.
So in order to pick somebody up again
and do that and be taking them,
the wind speeds would have to be
at least 120 to 125 miles an hour,
and how quickly they'd be moving past that
would have to be added on to that amount.
So if you want to see someone fly away from you
at 25 miles an hour, you're going to need
about 150-mile-an-hour winds to do so.
Lightning is really dangerous.
It can actually occur 30 miles outside of a storm.
So where you have your storm happening,
lightning can go beyond it.
So that's why there's a lot of these rules,
like the 30-30 safety rule.
So after you see the last flash of lightning,
wait 30 seconds until you hear that thunder.
So then you know that that's at least six miles away.
Then wait another 30 minutes before you go outside.
And this is really critical for weather safety
to make sure you don't get hit by lightning,
'cause thousands of people are hit by lightning every year.
I mean, it's got to be a 1.
I don't know anyone who's got the power of weather,
and I also don't know anyone who can hold on
in 120-mile-an-hour winds with their tongue.
To your right!
I'm going to get the transistor radio
to see if I can get the weather channel!
What does that thing mean?
There were a lot of cues in that
to go somewhere safe
and not just be messing around on the staircase.
There were sirens going off,
there was the loss of power,
there was the tornado warning on the television.
All things that people need to pay attention to,
and those are all serious.
You need to go take shelter
when those things are happening.
[sirens]
So, the sirens you hear in the background
are common in areas that are tornado-prone.
So if there's areas that are likely to get tornadoes
in the Midwest, a lot of towns have tornado sirens.
Now, the average for the National Weather Service
is somewhere between eight and 11 minutes of warning
before the tornado occurs,
letting you know that it's on its way.
The way they showed the inside of the house moving,
you know, you could see some vibrations
and things like that happening during a tornado.
If it's passing by,
it could last for a fairly long period of time,
like they showed here.
I'd give it about a 7.
I don't see too much wrong with it.
Thank you so much for watching.
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