Diksha Sundriyal
In 2024’s ‘Twisters,’ Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell star as storm chasers Kate Carter and Tyler Owens, who are ready to take whatever risk comes their way to get into the heart of a tornado and find ways to study and tame it. They begin with different approaches. Kate joins a company named Storm PAR, and she is invited into it by her long-time friend and fellow storm chaser, Javi. Their plan is to find a way to create a 3D model of the tornado that would help them know it better and help people. Meanwhile, Tyler is an infamous storm chaser with millions of followers on YouTube. He and his team, called Tornado Wranglers, are much less uptight and open-minded about their chase of tornadoes. Interestingly, both these groups have roots in reality.
Tyler Owens’ Tornado Wranglers are Inspired by Real Storm Chasers
While Tyler Owens’s character is mostly fictional, screenwriter Mark Smith turned to a real-life storm chaser to create a framework for the character. He followed Reed Timmer’s life and works to get a sense of what real storm chasing looks like, what factors influence it, and, more importantly, what drives a person to this path. After meeting Timmer, Smith knew that he had found the beginnings of Owens’ characters and modeled a lot of his looks and personality on Timmer.
For the uninitiated, Reed Timmer is a PhD-holding meteorologist who has about three decades worth of experience in the field. He started chasing storms at the age of eighteen and has since chased thousands of storms, facing things like an EF5 tornado and living to see the day. He has appeared on several TV shows and documentaries but is best known for hosting Discovery Channels’ Storm Chasers. Much like Tyler Owens and his Tornado Wranglers, Timmer has a huge following on his YouTube channel named Twisters IRL. He also chases in a heavily armored vehicle he calls a dominator. It is prepped with Kevlar-coated steel armor, bulletproof glass, and spikes that anchor his vehicle to the ground, quite close to what we see in ‘Twisters.’
In the movie, the Tornado Wranglers enjoy the thrill of the chase and don’t mind sending fireworks up a tornado to see how that would work. At the same time, they are also deeply involved with the affected communities and are often on the ground helping people once the danger has passed. Timmer, too, has a similar approach, relishing the thrill of the chase but also working with authorities to give them ground reports and help them get people to safety. He is also often seen in a tornado’s aftermath, helping people affected by it. All things considered, it is clear that Timmer has heavily influenced Tornado Wranglers and their work ethic in ‘Twisters.’
Storm PAR is Fictional, But the Tech is Real
While Tornado Wranglers are inspired by a real person, Storm PAR doesn’t share similarities with any real-life company per se. It is an entirely fictional creation. However, the tech that it claims to use for its research exists in real life. In the movie, Javi tells Kate about PAR (Phased Array Radar) that would capture the tornado from three ends, getting a 3-D scan of a tornado, which would help them understand its workings better. In real life, meteorologist Jana Houser is working on a similar thing.
Houser, the Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Ohio State University, “specializes in radar analysis of tornadoes and the supercell thunderstorms that commonly produce them by using state-of-the-art mobile radar observations.” Her research to “study the interaction of tornadoes with the ground beneath, addressing the problem of how topography and land cover impact tornado intensity and path” is funded by the National Science Foundation.
She revealed in an interview with Esquire that PAR’s tech in the movie is quite similar to a project she is currently working on. Calling it her “pie-in-the-sky, holy-grail data collection,” she talked about how the movie takes real-life tech and presents its own spin on it. In ‘Twisters,’ the tech is already well-developed, but according to Houser, research is still ongoing about how to make it work in real life. She also mentioned that unlike Storm PAR and their scanners, it would be impossible to get as close to tornadoes in real life, and it would realistically be better to have the sensors deployed from a distance because a tornado moves very fast. Still, she confirmed that the film understandably tweaked a few things to make things more exciting for the audience, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the tech is not far-fetched and is highly realistic.
Read More: Twisters (2024): Where Was the Movie Filmed?
