This is the most traumatic podcast ever and iHeartRadio podcast. Chris Harrison comany from the home office in Austin, Texas. I would say geographically just outside of Tornado Alley, which is where I grew up, but growing up in Dallas then going to school in Oklahoma. The reason I mentioned that is our obsession with the movie Twisters, an absolute box office hit with Glenn Palell, and everybody's been talking
about it. I shared a previous episode how during my days in Oklahoma City, when I was in local news, from time to time I would Stormchase and one of the biggest events was in late May of ninety nine, right before I left Oklahoma City. Actually I covered the biggest tornado outbreak at the time and one of the biggest tornadoes ever recorded. So the movie Twisters has kind of hit near and dear to my heart. And I found this guy, Sean Waugh, who actually worked on the
movie Twisters. He was kind of the technical expert. They recruited him and his teammates from the National Severe Storm Laboratory, which is down there in Norman, Oklahoma, about thirty forty five minute drive just south of Oklahoma City. It's where the University of Oklahoma is but to ensure an accurate portrayal of the chasing lifestyle of the storms, of the phrases and terms that we're used. Sewn Wah, who actually works he's a meteorologist, works in weather all the time.
They brought him in to work with the film crew, the actors and everything, and I just thought, what a great insight into one of our favorite films of the summer. So let's bring on our guest, Sean Waugh. Sean, good to talk to you.
Man.
It looks like you're in a tornado bunker. Are you Are you safe right now?
Are you? I am safe right now. I'm actually in Norman, Oklahoma at the National Weather Center.
Yeah, it's right down there in Norman, Oklahoma, next to the campus of OU. I was in So I was in Oklahoma City for ten twelve twelve years, I guess because I went to Oklahoma City University but then worked at Channel nine. And I'm sure you are familiar with all the meteorologists and stuff up there and where weather is king as we are in tornado season and we're in the middle of tornado Alley.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Weather It's one of those things that everybody talked about here like anywhere else in the world or in the country, it's kind of like, oh, we're talking about the weather, and you know here everybody gets really.
Excited about it.
There's this right of passage at a certain age where you get you know, your the best weather app and it's like we're all we're all you know, want to be meteorologists. Now you know that. Before there's there's no way anybody else had access to Doppler radar. Now I have it in my own phone, and so have you
seen that explosion? With smartphones and everything, In all seriousness, the amateur getting more and more involved in all of this, and I and probably a good way, but I'm sure there's some bad to it as well.
Absolutely.
I mean, if you go back and you ask people that have chased for you know, fifty sixty years, like, hey, like, how did you guys see things back in the day, The short answer is they really didn't most of the time. And technology has certainly made a lot of the aspects of what we do, you know, whether that be storm chasing or severe weather research, whatever it's it's really helped us like tune into things and do our job better.
But it's also opened the door to just people that just want to come out and see what mother nature
has to offer to kind of view things. And not that there's necessarily anything bad about that, but when it's so easy to just pull up a radar app on your phone, find the nearest tornado warning, and almost map yourself to it, it ends up creating like huge traffic problems on some of the events that I've seen, especially in central Oklahoma, on days that just get really hyped up, and I've actually had to abandon targets like pick a completely different storm just because I turned down a road
and this road sees like ten cars a year, and now there's a thousand.
People on it and annually it's total gridlock.
I mean it looks like you're driving around in like downtown Manhattan, you know, like just traffic jam everywhere. Everybody's out on the road. You can't move. That's a huge safety hazard. So I've actually like started factoring that into my like work plan and stuff.
That is bizarre. So yeah, So, I mean one of the things that's kind of manifested this conversation and everybody's excitement is obviously the movie Twisters came out and it has been a huge box office hit, as it was back by the way in the mid nineties. When the original came out in ninety six, I was very much
in the world of Oklahoma weather at the time. I was working at KWATV Channel nine at the time for you know, the god of all meteorologists, Gary England, the legend and the man who I think had a hand in creating Doppeler radar, which is crazy. But back then, there was never any Lookie Lose, never just some Joe Schmoe with with any sort of even a CB radio to figure out where these storms were. That's something we
never had to deal with. So you know that's scene from the movie Twisters where there's hundreds of people in a parking lot and they're all, you know, tourists. That's a real thing.
Absolutely, I actually joke. I mean at this point, I've seen the movie three times. It's tons of fun. You know, if you haven't seen it, definitely go watch it. Go watch it again.
It's a great ride. It's I've seen it twice already. I'm not gonna lie. I've seen it twice.
Perfect.
The most unrealistic part of that movie when they're doing the different chase scenes and it's only like the storm par vehicles or Tyler's team on the road, Like that is never the case in the real world. There are so many people that are out on these storms, and with social media and YouTube and you know, all of these different streaming platforms like Twitch and things, everybody now
has access to that high quality imagery. I used to go out with like a DSLR camera and now you just take my phone because it takes better photos than
I could on a DSLR. Right, So it's really easy for people to go out and put themselves in those positions, but it can also be really like dangerous, right, because if you don't know what you're doing, it's really easy to get yourself into a position that you really shouldn't be in, and you're kind of like flirting with things that could like ultimately cause like a lot of harm.
Or these things are very deadly. Yeah, like yeah, this kind of reminds me Sean of Mount Everest, which was this elusive mountain and very few people would climb it. And now you see these videos and it looks like a day at the mall. There are hundreds and hundreds of people lined up with sherpas, et cetera, and it's it's almost lost some of the purity and the sanctity of it. And I feel like this is kind of the same thing.
Yeah.
Absolutely, And I mean if you roll back ten fifteen ish years ago, that's when you first started really seeing a lot of these storm chasing groups that started popping up that offered tours.
Right, So if you.
Didn't know what you were doing, and you wanted to go out and wanted to see severe weather, you can actually book yourself a tour very similar to like a sherpa on Mount Everest.
Right. That just encourages people, And that's that's great. You know.
I love when people get to experience like mother nature and weather and all the fascination and beauty that goes along with it. But it has some downsides, which is that you know a lot of people are like, well, I don't need to pay for that. I can just go out on my own my own car, right, Like I have no training to climb Mount Everest, But nah, people do it all the time. So I'll just I'll just take a shirp and I'll just take on.
Me save everybody. A lot of a lot of money. Just go rent a house in Oklahoma City for one storm season. Trust me, the storms will find you. I mean it was every afternoon. I find it crazy that people are like, yeah, I'm gonna go find a storm. I'm like, I wanted to get away from the tornadoes.
I grew up me.
I grew up in Dallas and then lived in Oklahoma City for such a long time. Like, man, I'm I'm done. I'm happy to be down here in Austin. I'm just below. Like we may have like a small little f one every now and nothing, you know, not a big deal. I think the biggest one dropped many many years ago up in Durrell and that was a big one. But yeah, for the most part, we're pretty chill down here.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
What are some other things As I'm watching the movie and I'm fascinated by this, the juxtaposition to the first one to the second one. The second one got very scientific. It was really into the science, and the Bill Paxton Helen Hunt version was not that.
Yeah.
I love the original movie right that came out when I was ten. You know, it's something that I've grown up with.
Thanks for dating me, Sean. That's good. I watched was three years out of college.
But going back and watching the original one idiot horribly inaccurate as far as science goes. It doesn't really use the terminology ride, it doesn't depict things in sort of this real world interesting as meteorologists, we make fun of it a lot.
And one of the.
Best scenes that I can give is when they launched Dorothy into the tornado. In the original movie, they show a radar image, and most people don't realize that radar image is completely wrong. It is a clear air radar image. It's velocity data that they just picked at random from like a clear air day.
There's no storms on it. There's definitely no tornado on it.
So, like anybody that studies radar meteorology like really pays attention to little details on things like that, that's a huge problem. Right, So when we set out to make this movie, we wanted to make sure that there were none of those little things that people could nitpick and be like.
Well, this isn't real.
You know.
It is a Hollywood movie.
Yes, it is meant to be dramatic, and it's a thrill ride and it's high octane, and therefore it is exaggerative in a lot of aspects, but everything that you see in the movie is either based on real science, real theory, or real like equipment, technology, tools, things like that that we use in the real world. And we tried to make it as authentic as possible, and I think the results are kind of speaking for themselves, right. Everybody, meteorologists and non alike, just love the movie.
There's a podcast I love that Bill Simmons and his crew do called the Rewatchables, And one of the things they talk about in the Rewatchables is are these people actually is good at their jobs? You know, at the
end of the day, are they really good? And one of the things about Twister and Twisters, as I was talking about it with my wife, I'm like, you know, if you keep putting yourself right in front of a tornado coming at you, and you keep getting hit by this tornado, at some point you have to think, am I good at my job? That is one of the things that I think I told her is very exaggerated. I said, the goal of a chaser is not to get in front and sit in a tornado. You actually want to not do that?
Right? Yeah, most people, if you're going out of you're chasing and you want to get good photos. It's really not that exciting to get a photo inside a tornado. Like you can't see anything just very you know, right, like okay, like wow, like that's a big adrenaline rush. Sure, but like picture wise, like no hold me back. I want to be able to see the structure and the whole tornado and that sort of thing. And the research that we do here at Noah's National Spear Storms Laboratory
doesn't involve driving into tornadoes. We may get close, but we're trying to understand the characteristics that are feeding that storm. Right Driving into it and taking observations inside something as complex as a tornado.
Doesn't really help us a whole lot.
It doesn't tell us the whole picture. So like they're neat observations, sure, but like that's not really advancing the science and our understanding of So.
You're telling me you've never shot fireworks into a tornado?
Not yet? But you know how many.
People I've had say like, hey, was that you? Like did you give them that idea in the movie. I may have a habit of playing with fireworks around the fourth of July. I give it a year somebody's going to do it right, somebody's going to describe it.
I do love the fact that they called you guys, the real guys into technically thighs on this film and what were the things that you found that you were telling them in particular. And I love the fact that they said, no, I want, we want to come stormchasing with you.
Yeah, And we tried to make that work during filming, right because they were out here during tornado season. It was a little flower of the season last year compared to this year. But like, can you imagine trying to convince Universal Studios to let their multi million dollar talent in the middle of filming a movie just disappear for a day or two to go driving, you know, after a tornado.
Like they were like noolutely voids of London insurance policy. You need on Glenn Powell to drive right into a tornado, right, right.
So we when we got involved from from the advising and technical characteristics of the movie, there's probably not a part of the movie, to be honest, that I didn't touch me. And I had conversations with Ben Snow and Industrial Light and Magic about what Hail looks like, what tornadoes should look like. They used a lot of real footage from various chasers, including Sean Casey, that got them
some footage. I had multiple conversations with the cast and with the director about terminology tune Day's line that he has in there where he's talking about the tornadoes rotating around each other, and he's like, there's a term for that.
There's a term for that. Oh, who do you are? Effect?
You know, that was something that I gave them that they absolutely loved because it's so nerdy and cool in the moment that you know, he got really excited about it, but they also deeply wanted to learn, like they really wanted to know what.
All this meant.
I taught Tunday how to do hand analysis like in the old days, right, So they were soaking in all this information, helping the playback group pick the radar imagery that they were going to use. All the radar data that you see I hand selected so.
It matches up to the storm you're seeing exactly, right.
Like those are real radar data cases from real events that in some way mirror what was supposed to be happening in the film, so that it's very real and it's very authentic, and I think all that basically brings it together to tell a really accurate picture of kind of what this world and what this.
Environment is like working with you know, especially the two main leads in Daisy and Glenn were either one of them in particular really nerdy and into this and really wanted to hear like all the stories and the science and all that stuff.
Daisy especially was incredibly inquisitive when it came to this kind of stuff.
We actually did.
We brought them here to the Weathers Center and Rick Smith at the National Weather Center here he works for the OU Office for the National Weather Service. He actually gave them like a crash course in severe weather and storm chasing and meteorology.
It was like a two hour long course.
Daisy brought a notebook and she was like taking notes like she was in class, right, Like they so just love being able to immerse themselves in it. Glenn was constantly texting me, Hey, what does this mean?
Like this term?
Like? Am I using this right? This is what it's supposed to look like in this environment? What's a good phrase for this? How should I act? Brandon Perea, he did an incredible job with his character Boon and really bringing that kind of love and excitement to the film, and he was just as enthusiastic about learning like what meteorology is and how do we do all this kind of stuff and then being able to take them chasing.
This year in April, it ended up not being a big day, Like it looked great a couple of days out and then by the time you get the engine rolling, you know, of getting everybody out.
Here, it kind of fell apart.
But we made the best of the day and they really loved just.
Being all of that kind of come.
Together and really like going out and being in Southwest Kansas, and I think probably doubting me for a good bit of the day that there were going to be storms, and then seeing storms just explode into the evening and all this structure and lightning and stuff that they hadn't seen before.
It was an incredible liace.
So post movie release, Daisy and Glenn go to Kansas and go storm chasing with you.
Yeah, so we went.
I think it was April fifteenth this year. We were up in Southwest Kansas. It was a really late nocturnal event and they had a fighting Keep in mind, this was like a one day, thing like they were in the middle of doing other stuff dropped, everything came out here we went chasing. They had a flight out of Oklahoma City at seven am the next morning and like eleven o'clock we're up by like Dodge City.
And I was like, all right, we can call it.
Like I think there's you know, we're headed in the right spot, but like it's getting laid. I know, you guys got things to do. And Glenn looked at me from the back of the car and was like, I will buy property in Southwest Kansas before we call this chase off.
And I was like, Ahi, man, let's going, Like let's let's keep going.
You know. They were so enthusiastic and just wanted to soak it all in.
It was tons of fun.
It is.
It's amazing how much it's all changed. I you know, one of the last big stories I covered in Oklahoma City before I left was the big tornado outbreak in May of ninety nine and storm Chasers. It was, you know, the biggest tornado day we'd ever had in the history of the state, and the big one that came through more and teen careerpace in Midwest City del City area was late in the afternoon and it was the by far the biggest. That was the F five that came through.
And so the odd thing is I would have never been sent out on that story. I was a sportscaster. But there was eighty other tornadoes or one hundred, I don't know how many were that day, and so by the end of the day, I was all that was left. And they're like, you got to go, and I'm like, what do you mean, I gotta go? And so you know, I'm chasing this tornado and we didn't have to dry far because again it's very rare that they would rip through the middle of Oklahoma City, but this one was
so big, so destructive it did. And I'll never forget because our technology was Gary England was on the air, and I've never heard fear in his voice, but that one day, it's the only time I've ever heard him say, if you cannot get underground, get in your car. You've got to get out of there. You're not going to live. I've never heard him say that, and I never heard him say it since. Because typically you know any new or you know weather, so we'll say don't try and
out drive it. That's a terrible idea. But the other part of it that cracked me up is you're talking about technology and where we are this. You know, I couldn't see in the car, So there was a separate meteorologist that would look at a map and kind of keep track of where you were and where all the stormchasers were, and he would tell you if you were
in a good position a bad position. So you're just hoping that this person was keeping an eye on you among fifty other people out in the field, and that he was going to keep you out of harm's way. It was really archaic.
Yeah, And I mean nowadays, like everybody's got phones, he's got radar imagery, satellite imagery, cell phone, Internet. I mean, you have access to so much information that it makes you so easy now to go out comparatively and follow events like that. And I mean a lot of the news networks here in Oklahoma City, like they've got people on the ground, they've got holicopiers that are doing it.
I mean it's nuts, right, Like you look at a lot of other like media markets across the country, and nobody else has likeing hellicockers that they use.
It's pretty much just the Oklahoma City area.
So it's a it's a pretty wild environment down here in Oklahoma City, especially central like Oklahoma, Elreno More. We've had our fair share of big events in the last you know, several decades for sure.
How have you seen things changed just in the last month or so since Twister's no no pun intended dropped As far as the excitement of, you know, the weather serve, it's got to be fun for you because look, and I don't I mean this will all due respect, You're a weather nerd. This stuff's fun for you. This is your passion, this is your love. And so to see everybody else who is outside of Tornado Alley get so excited for weather in all this, it's got to be kind of fun for you.
Absolutely.
I really thrive like being able to talk to people about what it is I do and the passion that I have for the severe weather work that I do and try to understand the environment around us and then turn that into warning information and communication information that kind of helps save people's lives. Right, And if you roll back and you look at the original one thirty years ago when that came out, enrollment at OU's undergraduate like meteorology program.
Almost tripled for like twenty years. Right.
It inspired this absolute like new generation for students coming in it saw the movie and that was their like tipping point, like, Oh that's so cool, I want to go do that. This movie is gonna do the same thing. And I feel like honored, like just truly blessed to have any hand in that, to be a part of that, to have a role in inspiring that next generation of students that is going to help us tackle some of
these difficult problems that we're studying today. Only by like collaboratively working together and bringing new perspectives and ideas is how we solve big, complex problems like that. And this movie is absolutely going to do the same thing that the original one did.
I'll get you out of here with a couple of rapid fire questions. Number one, what when you watch the film, and again, this is Hollywood, we were all entertained. What was the most exaggerated moment where you said, oh, I don't know if we can get away with this or that's just not really how it's done.
I mean, aside from the one that I mentioned earlier with just the utter lack of traffic on any of the vehicles. The most obvious one is obviously killing a tornado. Right, Like, there's and there's sort of two questions there. One is can we do it? And there's no theory really to suggest that we can or that anybody's trying.
Next question, by the way, can we tame a tornado?
Right? I'm jumping your question here, But there's a deeper question, which is should we even if we.
Could, interesting, should we be stopping things like that? Right?
Because the weather as we experienced it, every heat wave, every cold front, every raindrop, hailstone, tornado, hurricane, all of that is a balancing act of the Earth trying to redistribute energy. Right, It's all a consequence of it trying to like return to a neutral state. If you throw a wrench into that engine, what's gonna happen? Right, Because
we really don't understand how that complexity works. Yeah, So if we start screwing around with things like trying to stop a tornado that's attempting to release energy, you're now charging the battery so to speak.
Right, where's that energy going to go?
What's the butterfly effect of that?
Absolutely? What's it going to do? Downstream?
So there's a lot of interesting questions with that, but that's probably the most over the top exaggerated thing out of the movie is, you know, killing a tornado.
Glenn Pal's truck that you know, digs down like a foot into soft dirt and he pulls into a tornado. First of all, the shrapnel, there's no two by fours going through the side of his car, and he's not being thrown around. Pretty unrealistic.
Yeah, yeah, And I mean there's a few people that have what I'm gonna call tornado tanks right that that do try to drive into tornadoes, and they're moderately successful at those, but there's a hidden limit.
In there that they don't really talk about, which is that they largely do lower end tornadoes. And it's not the wind that's the problem, like you said, it's what's in the wind, right, Like your car could probably take one hundred and sixty mile an hour wind, it's not going to take it two by four hitting your car at ninety So like that debris is what really starts to cause a lot of issues. And Tyler Struck certainly survives most of those tornadoes.
Without having anything hit it.
But you do see at the after the final sequence when they do some close ups, there's pin cushion stuff all over the.
Inside of that to kind of stimulate that debris stuff. Yeah.
Then, and I know things have advanced, So I guess my last question is I was going to piggyback off, you know, can we tame a tornado?
Is?
What are we trying to do? You know, yes, warning systems have gotten better, but as someone who grew up in Tornado Alley and still essentially lives here, things haven't gotten that much more advanced.
You know.
You know, we see the hook echo, you can kind of see these storms come in, but really when and where they drop and why is still a bit of a mystery at this point.
Absolutely.
I mean, twenty thirty years ago, average warning lead time was like a minute or two for tornado warnings, right most of them were either unwarned or you had no.
Warning at all.
Right Now, our average warning time is like thirteen minutes. I mean, it's a pretty good amount of time, to the point where we actually have people from a social science perspective that are trying to figure out, if we give you.
More time, is that a good thing? Yeah?
Because then people start like, oh, well, I got twenty minutes. You know, I can worry about that later. Well.
It was kind of the scene in the film I thought was very poignant was they were in they ran into that motel, and the girl goes, oh, no, these are always fifth warnings. Don't worry about it. You know. We get kind of lase fair about this stuff.
Absolutely, and that's one of the big like markers of things that we're trying to handle today. We know large scale conditions that are largely conducive for tornadoes, right what we don't know is why one stor in that environment will produce one and one won't even though they're in the same environment, Or why one storm has got a tornado that's like ten yards wide and was on the ground for four seconds, but twenty miles away is a storm that's got a tornado that's two miles wide has
been on the ground for forty five minutes. We don't understand the difference that's causing those, and in that we also don't quite know how to decrease that false alarm ratio. Most of our tornadoes nowadays are warned, But the other side of that is that we also have a lot of false alarms along with you, and we want to
avoid that cry wolf situation. So a lot of the work that we're doing now and the research that we're doing here at no a's National Sphere Storms Laboratory, is trying to understand why individual storms produce tornadoes, what causes them to be so large and variable, and then ultimately what causes them to dissipate. That's a process we really don't understand and that's a lot of our focus today.
Well, worst case scenario and I'll just say this is my PSA, go spend thirty minutes in a bathtub, in your closet or in your storm shelter. You'll be glad you did it just in case. Absolutely, you and I have both seen the destruction of these things and you do not want to be on the back end of one that comes through your house. But John, I appreciate it very much.
Man.
It's you know, the film was brilliant and you're the expertise you added and that layer that you guys added, there was a discernible difference between that first one in ninety six with Bill Paxton and what was done with Glenn Palell and Daisy on this one, and so well done.
Yeah, I have a ton of fun making it. I know, the cast and the crew really enjoyed it. And at the end of the day, honestly, these are friends and family to me now, like everybody was so connected, and really, you know, Isaac has said this several times, he really wanted to bring out that Oklahoma spirit, you know, that resiliency that you see after you know, horrible events like these, you know, types of events that happened.
It actually tends to bring out the best.
In communities and in people at large, and he really wanted to try to capture that and tell that in story, and I think he did an incredible job with that.
One of my most memorable moments wasn't you know April nineteenth, after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in ninety five, or even the tornadoes in ninety nine. It was the days that followed, in the outpouring of love of Oklahoma's and how people come together. And then in the days that
followed that tornado outbreak. I remember I would be out in front of Channel nine and we set up all these trucks and feed the children was there and people were just filling trucks full of clothes and donations and you're right that that's showing that community, and it struck me. I had a good friend, a fraternity brother who passed
away who lived in Areno. We spent a lot of time in Areno, and so for the pin ultimate I won't give too much away, no spoilers, but the pin ultimate moment happening in Areno was a very very cool thing to see.
Yeah, And I mean, we do a lot of severe weatherwork here.
You know, tornadoes obviously, but I've also done a lot of hurricanes, and some of the best in humanity that I've seen has come out in hurricane environments. We actually got trapped on of what then became an island, you know, in North Carolina, because we got cut off by floodwaters, and I watched the community come together in a way
that I'd never seen before. Societal structure disappeared, racial barriers, financial barriers, like everybody was just human at that point and everybody was working together to help each other out. And it's really nice to see things like that nowadays. And it's terrible that it brings something, you know, that it has something so devastating to have to bring that out.
But with all the negativity in the world.
It's really nice sometimes to focus on the good things that happen.
Amazing how mother nature can humble us and then put us all on the same level. And No, but the movie. Absolutely, if you've not seen Twisters, go see it. I can't recommend it enough, and I am biased. I will say I spent so much time in Oklahoma. I have so much love for the people of Oklahoma. But the soundtrack,
the acting, the action. You know, one of the things I loved about the original was just the pace of it was so fast and so crazy, and I love that the story felt the same, but it wasn't redundant, if that makes sense. They were able to take it in a different direction. But then, you know, the Easter eggs. If you see the first one, you don't need to see the first one, but if you do, there was enough Easter eggs in there that were really, really fun
that just made it a great movie. So congratulations on whatever part you had in it. To say you had a part is a wonderful thing. It's something that really left the market. Hey, you're you're responsible for partly bringing back the next Barbenheimer. You know, we have Deadpool and Twisters now, right.
Yeah, no, it's been so much fun. And you know, I'm already looking forward to the steeple.
Let's put it that one always there, by the way, is there's going to be another?
I mean they kind of I mean right, they kind of left it out like, yeah, there might be you know, so we'll see what Hollywood decides to do with things. I think everybody really enjoyed making it, so it would not shock me, not that I have any inside information at all, but like it would not shine.
I do have inside information. When a movie does eighty point five million in the box office and opening weekend, they tend to go back to the well, yeah, yeah, there's twisters. There's twisters. Now look forward to twisters.
Is yeah. I think we just keep adding assets, just keep arding uses. Sean.
I appreciate your time and thanks for looking out for everybody and continuing the work you do on a serious note, much less helping out one of the great movies.
Absolutely, thanks for listening.
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