Weather in the Movies Assignment

Assignment Background: The instruction for this assignment was to pick a movie
with a weather phenomenon. The movie was then supposed to be analyzed and
reported on how the weather was important to the movie, and the science behind the
weather phenomenon.

The movie “The Wizard of Oz” Dorthy is a young girl who runs away from her
home town in Kansas. Dorthy runs away because she is ordered by the town sheriff to
put euthanize her dog - Dorthy refuses to do so. As she is out on her journey, she runs
into a fortune teller, Dorthy is convinced by the fortune teller that her Aunt has become
ill. Dorthy then begins her long journey, but eventually makes it back to Kansas. Just as
she is arriving home, a tornado strikes, making it challenging to find her family. This
plays a significant role in the plot of the movie, because the tornado ends up taking the
life of the wicked witch of the west, this brings extreme gratitude and a town celebration
that concludes the movie.

Considering how old the movie is and how hard a tornado would be to replicate, I
think they did a great job at making it look pretty realistic. Although there was some
unrealistic factors and characteristics involved in the tornado such as, a woman riding a
bicycle through the tornado, or an entire house staying intact while floating through the
tornado, this should be consider more relevant to the plot of the movie rather than the
natural disaster in it. I feel as if did a great job of creating this storm. The tornado shows
great significance to the movie, the story would be drastically different without it.

A tornado is a vertical funnel or vortex made up of violent and powerful rotating

winds touching from the clouds to Earth’s surface. The funnel is made up of water, dirt,
dust, and other debris picked up throughout the occurrence. There are many factors
that come into causing a tornado; a tornado typically starts with violent thunderstorms.
Low moisture levels in the air will result in thunderstorms, leading to unstable
atmosphere conditions. When there are unstable and conflictive conditions in the upper
and lower atmosphere, with a mixture of moist and dry climates in each atmosphere,
this then causes the beginning stages of a tornado. This will then intensify with
windshears. Windshear is the change of wind direction, distance, and speed. The air
and winds will then begin to rise from the ground, and lower from the clouds to create a
funnel, this is how a tornado forms.

The United States has more tornadoes than anywhere in the world. (Amadeo,
2019) This is for various reasons; one being the large amount of land makes it a huge
target. Another reason is the differences climate such as, temperature and humidity
throughout the various states. According to Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist,
most tornadoes last for less than ten minutes. (Howard, 2016) Although that may not
seem like a long time, within those ten minutes, tornadoes can cause a lot of damage
as they are very powerful and destructive. However, there are more intense tornados
that do last longer, this is just an average.

Damage of a tornado is reported using the Fujita scale. The Fujita scale was
created in 1971 by Professor Fujita and Allen Pearson director of NSSFC. Although,
there is some room for this scale ranks tornadoes on a base from 0 to 5. After a tornado
occurs, surveyors will collect information about the wind speeds, and the results of
damage done to determine the ranking on the Fujita scale.

References:

Amadeo, Kimberly. “Worst Tornado Damage Ever.” The Balance, 18 Mar. 2019,
www.thebalance.com/tornado-damage-to-the-economy-3305667.

Elsner JB, Jagger TH, Fricker T (2016) Statistical Models for Tornado Climatology: Long and Short-Term
Views. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0166895. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0166895

Howard, Brian Clark. “How Tornadoes Form and Why They're so Unpredictable.” National
Geographic, National Geographic Society, 2 Aug. 2016,
news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/05/150511-tornadoes-storms-midwest-weather-science/.

Markowski, Paul, and Yvette Richardson. “What We Know and Don't Know about Tornado
Formation.” Physics Today, American Institute of Physics, 1 Sept. 2014,
physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/PT.3.2514.