- Lightning doesn't strike

twice in the same place.

[lightning strikes]

[lady screams]
[beep]

- Common weather myth,

lightning doesn't strike twice

it does absolutely all the time.

Now the odds of any point on earth

getting struck twice are

slim because you know

lightning is the size of a pencil

but think of The Empire State Building

or some other skyscraper that

has a lightning rod on it,

lightning strikes there all the time,

so lightning can strike twice.

Hey, GQ, I'm David Yeomans

and this is The Breakdown.

[upbeat music]

- First up, The Day After Tomorrow,

- [Newscaster] We have live coverage now

from our Fox 11 chopper,

are you there Bart?

- [Bart] Yes, I'm here--

- Natural disasters
are naturally occurring

horrible catastrophes that

we have no control over

and that we oftentimes can't even predict.

some natural disasters like

tornadoes or hurricanes,

they happen at different

parts of the world
and they can happen many
times in a given year.

[tornado churning]

[intense music]

Right off the bat, this is

a really spectacular scene

but this part of the movie

is taking place in LA.

While LA has had some small weak tornadoes

over the past 50 or 60 years.

We've never had multiple

tornadoes like this in Los Angeles

and we've never had intense tornadoes

like these appear to be in Los Angeles.

So a tornado is a violently spinning

and rising column of air.

Typically it happens in
a super cell thunderstorm

which is when you have a

really intense thunderstorm

with all this rising

air called an updraft,

but then you also have

what's called wind shear

which is winds at different

Heights in the atmosphere

blowing different directions

and also at different speeds.

And if all those things

come together just right

you have not only rising

air inside of the storm

but you have rising and spinning

air inside of the storm.

These tornadoes here have

more of the appearance
of what's called a
super cell thunderstorm.

So these are the tornadoes

that happen in Oklahoma

or the Midwest, or even parts of Texas.

This is where the

conditions in the atmosphere

are conducive for really intense

and spectacular tornadoes.

The ones that happen in

LA on the rare occasion

that they do happen, they

would generally be a much

skinnier, much smaller to

make a tornado like this

in the Midwest where it usually happens,

you need warm moist air

down at ground level,

down at the surface, generally in LA,

you have this cool stable

air near the surface,

and actually the air a few

thousand feet high is warmer

than it is down at the ground,

so it makes tornadoes
like this very unlikely.

- [Newscaster] We have live coverage now

from our Fox 11 chopper,

are you there Bart?

- While we have observed

multiple tornadoes at once,

it's usually just two

tornadoes side-by-side

and that even in the Midwest

or Tornado Alley is very rare.

So seeing something like

this in Los Angeles,

where they really rarely

even get tornadoes

would be pretty unheard of.

The most tornadoes I'm aware

of happening simultaneously

is three,

but that, it was from an old

photograph and it's quite rare.

Tornadoes are so sensitive

to their environment

and that's why they

never last for that long,

usually at least.

They need everything to be just right,

and if one thing disrupts

that it's gone, you know

you would think it'd be very

dangerous to fly a helicopter

near a tornado, but they actually

do this pretty frequently

in places like Oklahoma.

A lot of the news stations

up there have helicopters,

and during tornado outbreaks,

they'll put their choppers up in the sky

to give their viewers the

best view of the tornado,

so this can actually be done.

It's kind of a common myth actually

is that mountains protect

you from tornadoes

or hills protect you from tornadoes.

The truth is that tornadoes

can happen in mountains
and they can happen in hilly terrain.

Why we typically think of tornadoes

as happening on flat land,

that's just because of

where Tornado Alley is.

It's in the Midwest and

Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri

and most of that land is flat

but it's not the flat land

that causes the tornadoes,

it just happens to be
where the meteorological

ingredients come together.

The U S has the most tornadoes

out of anywhere in the world,

and we'll get 100s of

tornadoes every single year.

Maybe even some that we don't know about

because they happen where

the radar can't see very well

or where nobody actually

saw it with their eyes.

- What you're seeing are

two Asheville tornadoes

striking Los Angeles

International Airport,

wait it looks like they joined

and formed one large tornado.

- Harvey!

- Oh my god.

- This is unrealistic just

from the news perspective

because when you're a reporter live on air

you would never be driving

and having your photographer
in the front seat.

Driving is distracting enough.

Driving into a tornado

is really distracting.

Two tornadoes like this,

typically don't combine into one.

It's not completely unheard of,

their circulations don't

necessarily attract each other,

if anything, they kind

of like to be separated,

so when two tornadoes come together

they may actually fizzle out entirely

because they may kind of

counteract one another

or mess up the other's environment.

- [Man] Unbelievable , it's huge,

I've never seen anything like it.

- Okay, wait, pause it,

[David laughs]

There's so much stuff

to tear apart in that.

So that was a seismograph,

which measures earthquakes,

So apparently now there's

tornadoes causing earthquakes

which is not a thing.

Earthquakes are a geological phenomenon

that happens underground,

and tornadoes are an atmospheric thing,

they happen up above the ground.

- What a nightmare, only

this is the real thing.
- If a tornado throws
some debris, you know

that's been lofted up in the cloud

and then it kind of drops

it outside of the wind zone,

If you will, that's

realistic, that can happen,

something can plop down onto the ground.

But if this billboard is getting carried

straight up sideways
and it creams this guy

and takes his body away just like that,

he wouldn't have been

able to be standing there

in the first place,

because I know from

experience in hurricanes

it's almost impossible for

a grown person to stand up

in a 60, 65 mile an hour wind or stronger,

these violent tornadoes

have winds of well over

100 or 150 miles an hour it looks like.

So if they're going to throw

this billboard past him

it is unrealistic that he would

just be able to stand there

until the billboard crushes him.

That destruction of a
well-built skyscraper

is very difficult for any

tornado to accomplish.

Even an EF5, the strongest on the scale.

The enhanced Fujita scale,

zero is the weakest on the tornado scale,

they have winds of less

than a 100 miles per hour.

EF5 is the strongest

and those have winds of

over 200 miles per hour.

We've even had Doppler radar

measurements of tornadic winds

over 300 miles per hour before,

which is pretty unheard of.

All right, let's fast forward

to later in the same movie.

[upbeat music]

So right there, we were looking from space

down into a really intense hurricane

probably a category four or five,

and the scale only goes up to five.

This is unrealistic

because a hurricane is a
really warm cored storm.

You would never have a hurricane

and a snow storm or

whatever's going on here,

simultaneously in the same place.

Hurricanes have really moist,

warm air feeding into them,

kind of like a tornado.

You can't have a cold cored hurricane

like this one appears to be.

[intense music]

I love what this thing is modeled after,

because it is modeled after

a real historical event
10,000 years ago, a mini ice age.

It was called the Younger Dryas event.

So what happened was the earth

was warming 10,000 years ago,

and that global warming actually

melted so much of the ice

from Greenland into the

North Atlantic ocean

that that fresh water melt

threw off all of the ocean currents,

Europe, especially went

into a mini ice age

on a very, very short

scale, just about 10 years,

that in the scale of climate

was called abrupt climate change

but happening like this

is very unrealistic

where in this movie, it just

happens in minutes or hours.

[intense music]

To get something like this,

this looks like you're pouring

liquid nitrogen all over it

which is like 400 degrees

below zero Fahrenheit.

Skyscrapers can survive negative

20 or negative 40 degrees

as long as they're built for it,

like we have up in the

Northern US and in Canada.

Actually having something

freeze the building like this

and explode the windows,

that's very unrealistic,
as far as being caused from weather.

If there were some

sudden freeze like this,

the air wouldn't travel downward,

if anything, in the atmosphere, actually,

when you have sinking

air, it heats the air up.

So having the air crawl

down the buildings like this

into this ultra freeze is a little shaky.

[wind gushing]

[flag freezing]

So a second ago we were kind

of in the eye of the hurricane,

you could see, they call

it the stadium effect

where you're looking at this stadium,

it's like football stadium,

and you're the player

of clouds around you that

are 40 or 50,000 feet high

and that's real for a hurricane

but it's not real for whatever

intense freeze this is.

The eye of the hurricane like

that, you would see the sun

and you would see the spectacular

ring of clouds around you,

but it wouldn't be below

zero, like it is here,

It'd be really warm actually.

- Close the door,

don't let the fire go out.

- This whole monster, you know,

coming through the hallways
at you is not quite how weather works.

And a fire like that

could keep the room warm

if it's below zero in

the rest of the house

or in the rest of that

building, but then of course,

the question becomes how long

does it stay that cold outside

from this disaster?

And how long can you keep the fire going?

So in freezing temperatures,
it's always good

to stay at home because a lot of people

get in trouble traveling on

the roadways in a snow storm,

and then they end up sliding off the road

or getting into a car accident

and then they're stranded.

So if you do have to travel,

we always recommend that

you have a survival kit

basically in the trunk,

blankets, big parkas or jackets,

some food or water, the

best way to do it though,

is to just stay home.

I really like what the

movie is modeled after,

global warming actually leading

to abrupt global cooling,

because that did happen 10,000 years ago

but happening in this

way, and this dramatic

with the whole hurricane spinning over you

those were all added in by
Hollywood unfortunately.

[David chuckles]

next up, The Crown.

- [Radio Host] London is in

brutal hold by death's fog

which has descended overnight.

- Good God.

- [Newscaster] Meteorological
officers issued a statement

saying that the persistent

anticyclone over London

is to blame.

- This is very meteorologically accurate.

So this was the great London smog of 1952

and thousands of people died.

And they said, it's

because of an anticyclone.

While cyclone is a storm

and typically storms have

rising air and that's

how clouds and rain form,

in an anticyclone, it's
kind of like the opposite.

Air actually sinks on top of you.

So if you have air sinking on top of you

and you're in 1950s London

with no pollution controls

it smushes all that smog,

which would usually disperse

into the higher levels of the atmosphere

right down at ground level.

It's a sort of like a

temperature inversion
that you see over LA.

And it can really create super dense

and very very unhealthy smog,

and that's what happened for a few days.

Smog is like a dirty fog.

Smog is caused by pollution,

it's particles like soot or ash

or car exhaust that hang

out at ground level.

Fog is just a cloud on the

ground, so fog is much more pure.

- [Newscaster] It could last for sometime,

be careful out there,

it's a real bee super.

- This lasted so long because

of the weather pattern.

Dirty, growing, populous city

was emitting all this

stuff into the atmosphere,

and usually they can do that

because the wind blows it away

or it disperses into the

levels of the atmosphere

but this persistent sinking

air and very calm conditions

in the city, just

trapped all the emissions

and all the pollutants right there.

And it was actually so unhealthy

that it killed thousands of

people in a short amount of time

in some cities around the

world, you know, Los Angeles,

parts of China where we have

a lot of people in a tiny area
and certain weather patterns,

you can get smog and really

dangerous hazardous air,

that's bad to breathe.

You see people wearing

masks, just walking around

even before COVID-19.

LA has such bad smog for instance

because the cold Pacific

ocean makes the air

right here at the surface and in LA cooler

than it would otherwise be.

If you have cold air under warm air

it's just trapped right there in place

and that's why some of the

smog can get trapped too.

[footsteps thudding]

So this is actually a bad

idea in pollution and smog

it's that thick and that unhealthy,

you don't want to be outside,

and especially outside exerting yourself

where you breathe more

of the particles in,

you want to be inside, because

inside, even in 1950s, London

it would have provided you

some level of protection

from that outside dirty

air, and now, you know,

with our air filtration in

our homes and businesses,

it would provide you a lot of protection

from air that dirty.

She wanted to keep her

appointment, which is admirable

but it was actually what

killed a lot of people

is being out in it for a long time.

Next up, Only The Brave.

- Prepare a deployment
sack right here, now.

- We can't go back up there.

- There's no time, Jesse.

- This is about a real fire in Arizona

that killed a bunch of

expert firefighters.

Lightning is actually a
huge cause of wildfires

and it was the cause of this

actual fire in reality as well.

It's especially dangerous in

the desert where you can have

what's called dry lightning.

It's a thunderstorm that's

producing lightning and thunder

and it's trying to produce rain

but the rain actually

evaporates on its way down

to the ground because the

air is so dry in a desert,

so then you have a spark, right?

But you don't have any water falling

from the storm to put a fire out.

So lightning-caused fires
are actually super frequent

and they're very dangerous.

- We are in front of the flaming front.

[fire blazing]

- Huge fires can actually create

their own weather systems.

It's fascinating.

Fires are so hot and so big sometimes,

and so intense, that it

creates this huge current

of rising air.

that current of rising air can make winds

within the fire zone,

60, 70 miles per hour,

as strong as a hurricane.

It can also create its own cloud

or even sometimes its own

thunderstorm right above it.

So when an electric charge

builds up in a cloud,

an opposing electric charge

builds up on the ground

underneath it and then

to get comfortable, boom,

it releases the charge,

discharging a bolt of lightning.

Obviously drier terrains are

more likely to catch fire

than wetter terrains are places

that get a lot of moisture

or are close to the ocean or swamp lands.

The drier the fuel is,

like a tree or some grass,

the easier that fuel is going to burn.

- [Guy Over Walkie] South side of the fire

- Abort.
Abort, abort.

- Wildfires can move at 15 miles an hour

or even faster in localized

areas, depending on the wind,

and these guys it's heartbreaking 19

of some of the best

firefighters in the world

were killed that day.

You get trapped inside of a wildfire

like they unfortunately were

obviously fire is the main issue

but also fires that big

can use up all the oxygen in the area

so that becomes a
different problem as well.

Wildfires produce so much smoke

and ash into the atmosphere

that it can travel across States,

it can travel across countries,

continents, and oceans

and it can have a cooling effect

because it can block the

sun at a certain location

kind of like a cloud is over you,

or if it travels at lower
levels the atmosphere

can actually degrade the air quality

and be dangerous to breathe.

Even, you know, we saw an

air quality effect in Texas

from the California wildfires

about less than a year ago

because the smoke, you know

moves throughout the atmosphere.
Everything is connected.

That's why, what happens

here doesn't stay there

in the world of weather.

Next up Twister.

- You've got to get further ahead of it.

- I know what I'm doing.

- Cut across the field Bill.

- I know I have to get ahead of it.

- So this was made in the nineties.

I mean this got a whole

generation of people

into the weather, including me.

And the special effects even

from back in the nineties

I think really hold up pretty well today.

It looks like a very realistic tornado,

now you've got debris

spinning around on the ground

which is dirt or whatever else

is chewed up by the tornado.

And then the condensation

funnel is basically

that tornado itself.

It's the cloud that extends to

the ground that you see here.

So the whole premise of the

movie is also pretty realistic.

You've got storm chasers who do this

sometimes for a living

and you've got people

trying to put meteorological instruments

in the way of a tornado,

so we can actually make
measurements inside of a tornado.

People still have limited success doing

because tornadoes are so

unpredictable and so quick.

It's really, really hard

to put an instrument

in the way of a tornado and

then get yourself out of there

before it eats you up too.

Weather forecasting
technology has really advanced

since the nineties, but

predicting tornadoes

especially exactly when and

where they're going to form,

is still super tricky.

So if we learn more about how it works

we can understand it better

and we can predict them better.

If we can predict them better

then we can keep more people safe.

- [Man Over Radio] This

is three miles south east.

Let's see what she does.

- Tornadoes can bend like that,

I know it looks kind of wild,

but especially what we call

a rope tornado, which

is this one right here.

It's very skinny, like a rope

from the cloud to the ground.

They can kind of meander

and wave to and fro

even as tornadoes generally

move from Southwest to Northeast

because that's the way the

winds and the atmosphere

are generally blowing when

it's conducive for a tornado.

They can still wobble on that

path, which is another reason

it's really, really

dangerous to chase a tornado

and to be that close to it.

- [Man Over Radio] It's

coming towards you John.

[tornado growling]

- I'm not sure what they

accomplished by going

into a dirt gully, 10 feet beside the road

where they already were.

I guess they're trying to

get in front of the tornado

to put Dorothy the weather

instruments in the way

but now they're trapped here.

Also. You heard right there,

the tornado's growling

[tornado growling]

Tornadoes obviously don't

make any animalistic noises

like that.

They'd been described as

freight trains pretty often

because of the massive

amount of wind and debris

that it's chewing up, as we say,

but it's not going to sound quite

like a lion or a tiger like this.

You really never know
the path that a tornado

is exactly going to take,

and that's why storm chasing

is still super dangerous

even with all the technology we have

and people who have been doing

it professionally for decades

they still die sometimes

because they get too close

or in the wrong path of the wrong tornado.

And that happened, you know

just less than 10 years ago in Oklahoma.

So tornado chasing is still

something that's really

really dangerous even to this day.

Tornadoes typically move

maybe 20 to 40 miles per hour.

So you could technically

out-drive a tornado

but we really advise people

not to do that because at home

or at your business, or at your

school is the safest place.

If you are trying to out drive it,

A, there might be a traffic jam

because other people

are trying to do that,

and then you get stuck in traffic

and you get in the path of a tornado

or B, the tornado might be

moving at 60, 70 miles per hour,

and you're on neighborhood streets

or somewhere else where you're

not able to go that fast.

There a few easy things to keep in mind

indoors in the lowest

floor of the building

or ideally underground in
a basement if you have one

and away from exterior walls and windows.

And the reason for

being as low as possible

is because if you're on
the second or third floor

the winds and the tornado are

actually stronger up there

because they don't get

slowed down by friction

with the earth surface.

[tornado growling]

- Joe this is crazy, forget it,

let's go.
- Let go.

- Notice they're both

looking into the tornado

which is also a theme of

this movie from so close.

The winds would be so

strong, actually blowing

toward the tornado that you

probably wouldn't be able

to have your eyes open much

at all because there's dust

and debris floating around

your eyes would really hurt

if you did open them really,

really dangerous thing to do.

[Debris rumbling]

- Find something to grab a hold on.

- I know.

- They're actually doing it pretty right.

You're supposed to get as

low to the ground as possible

in a ditch or gully to try to stimulate

that underground thing

to get out of the wind.

The common thing about

going under an overpass

and wedging your body under an overpass

has actually been debunked

and that's a very, very

dangerous thing to do.

The winds can funnel underneath

there and get even stronger

and also if multiple people try to do that

then you've got a traffic jam

and you've got people

competing for the same space.

[wood creaking]

That's very realistic.

Tornadoes have wind so strong,

they can pull wooden

planks off of whatever

they're nailed to.

Even more impressive than that,

it can not only throw

nails really, really fast,

it can actually throw a plastic straw Into

a stump of a tree.

There's a picture after an EF5 tornado,

the strongest on the scale.

So really, really powerful stuff.

It's really a tough to guess

based on looking at a tornado

how strong it is.

As a general rule, the skinnier

it is, the weaker it is

and the wider it is, the stronger it is.

But you can't always tell,

even if the radar tells you

how strong the winds are

which it does

you can't tell how strong

it really is on the ground.

And if the tornadoes

just over an open field,

we actually don't know how strong it was

because we only know how

strong a tornado was by based

on the damage it does to

whatever type of building it was

and how, how stable that construction was.

It might be an unknown intensity

and that's the way it goes

down in the record books

as an EFU for unknown.

- Where's my truck?

[car crashing]

[tires screeching]
[lady screaming]

- Tornadoes can certainly

loft cars and farm machinery

like you saw there,

but it wouldn't happen

as neatly as you saw,
just kind of rising up
like the resurrection.

And it also would be so

windy where our heroes are

that they would probably

get sucked up too.

If it can lift a car 10 feet from you

then that delineation between

tornadic winds and calm air

is not that sharp.

It's kind of a blurred line, if you will,

of really, really windy stuff.

So it can certainly pick up a truck

and drop it somewhere else,

It could even drop it

farther away than this.

Tornadoes can also disappear

at the drop of a hat like that.

They're super sensitive

to their environment.

So if something stops or

if something goes amiss in the environment

the tornado can just disappear like that.

Next up, The Wolf of Wall Street.

- You might run into some chop,

- Chop, we can [beep] handle chop, right?

I mean, it's a 170 foot yacht.

[thunder rumbling]

- This movie is crazy.

So this is actually,
everything in this one,

as far as I can tell, is quite realistic.

This is based on a true story

not only after the actual
Wolf of Wall Street

in the 90's, but this exact situation

and the captain actually

had some reservations

because there was according

to the weather forecast

supposed to be a small storm

and some chop as they called it

and then they got into some trouble.

Chop is just rough waters on the ocean.

So if you're in a 170 foot

yacht, you can handle some chop.

Chop is like one to three foot seas

or maybe five foot seas,

how big the waves are,

but what they get into is not chop.

It's, you know, deadly terrifying seas

that no private yacht

like this could survive.

Storms at sea, we don't obviously

have weather instruments,

we don't have weather stations

positioned around the ocean.

So at sea we rely more on satellite data.

So the satellites are orbiting

the earth, so it can see

all of the clouds can even

detect the winds at the surface.

And it does so actually by

detecting the wave height

on the surface and using complex math

to derive how strong the winds

are to get waves that height.
So this type of storm is
actually called a mistral

and it happens in the Mediterranean Sea.

And what happens is something

causes the wind from the Alps

to rush down through the Alps

and across the

Mediterranean toward Africa,

and these winds can get

really, really strong,

and they're actually quite hard

to predict even to this day

mistrals are more of a localized effect.

They happen when hot air rises

to the South of the Mediterranean Sea,

so air rushes in to fill the void

and you get really strong winds blowing

across the Mediterranean Sea.

So it's a totally different phenomenon,

it's not swirling like a hurricane is,

and it's a smaller scale

feature than a hurricane is too.

- [Captain] The waves are

20 feet high and building

- Turn around, let's go

the other [beep] way.

- You get 20 foot waves from

hurricane force winds for sure.

And the waves in an event

like this, as strong as it was

can be 50 feet or even higher.

You probably wouldn't

have the moon at all,

so it wouldn't be this bright at all,

you'd be in the middle
of a storm and clouds

and it'd be quite dark outside,

you wouldn't be able to

see the ocean as well

as we can see it here.

Now, yachts like this do have

really powerful headlights

basically, and also

sidelights and back lights

so they can light up the

immediate area around them

but we wouldn't be able to

see the whole ocean like this,

that's kind of for effect, I think.

[thunder rumbling]

[waves raving]

- [Captain] Hold on, get away

from the window, rogue wave.

[waves raving]

- It's every captain's worst nightmare.

If you have 20 or even 50

foot seas like we had here

and there's a rogue wave,

rogue waves can actually be

one and a half times that

height, or even twice that height

a rogue wave is where two

waves come together just right

to where they kind of double each other.

You know, it's, we call it

constructive interference

instead of destructive
interference in physics,

and they can actually

build upon each other,
and that can double the wave height,

which is, it looks like what happens here.

Next up, War of the Worlds.

[people chattering indistinctly]

This is one of my favorite

things about weather

is, you know in our age of

digital distractions and phones,

always in front of our

faces, weather has the power

to make everybody stop what they're doing.

It can kind of captivate

everybody and take center stage,

that's one of the things

that I love most about it.

So the light in the

middle of it is baffling.

I would think there's probably

an alien invasion happening

but a dark lowering of the

clowns that swirling like this

that could be a wall cloud

which is the beginning signs of a tornado.

[wind gushing]

- What?

- The wind is blowing towards the storm.

- That is weird.

- There are a few things in this movie

that are actually pretty

meteorologically in tune,

and that was one of them.

He said,

"it's so weird the wind is

blowing toward the storm."

So typically in a storm, if you have rain

coming out of a cloud and

coming toward the ground,

that rain cools the air, hits the ground,

and it has nowhere to go but out,

but this can actually be

another sign of a tornado,

because instead of rain

cooled air hitting the ground

and spreading out from

the storm, it's inflow,

it's the storm itself sucking

air in at the ground level

into what could become

that rotating column of air

that's the tornado.

So a typical thunderstorm
cloud is just kind of low

and it's dark and it

might be kind of messy,

we call it a Scud clouds sometimes

it looks like just debris

of weird clouds littered around.

- Are you okay?

[thunder rumbles]

- Where is the thunder?

- We all know what thunder sounds like,

and if you're that close to lightning,

it's really a loud cracking

and like a deafening boom.

So that's what they would be hearing,

it sounds a little bit weird

and he's kind of picking up that

maybe this isn't weather related.

You can certainly have

lightning without rain

but you can't have

lightning without thunder,

there's always thunder.

It's just, you're too far away from it.

Lightning causes thunder

because it super heats the air

to 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit

it's way hotter than the

surface of the sun even.

So when it super heats the

air in an instant like that

it creates a sonic boom

that radiates outward

from the lightning strike

itself, and that's thunder.

If you're super close to it

it sounds like a really loud crack.

And if you're really far away from it

it's more of a slow rolling boom.

In a lightning storm, if you're outside,

you are in danger of being struck

even if you're 10 or 20
miles away from the storm

and it's not even raining where you are.

We call that a bolt from the blue

because there can actually be sun shining

but if there's a storm next to you nearby

you can actually get struck

by lightning and killed.

In a lightning storm, the safest

place to be as in a vehicle

which is, kind of conducts

the electricity around you

and is grounded or insulated

by the rubber tires,

or at home is even better.

If the worst does happen

and lightning strikes close to your home

or if it strikes your home,

it's unlikely to actually

conduct the electricity

to your body.

- Second hit there again.

Okay, because lightning doesn't

strike twice in the same

[thunder rumbling]

[girl screams]
[beep]

[thunder rumbling]

- Common weather myth,

lightning doesn't strike twice.

It does absolutely all the time.

Now the odds of any point on

earth getting struck twice

are slim because you know

lightning is the size of a pencil

and you know what are the odds

of that versus somewhere else

but think of the Empire State Building

or some other skyscraper that

has a lightning rod on it.

Lightning strikes there all the time.

So lightning can strike twice.

Next up Mad Max Fury Road.

[wind gushing]

So what they're driving

into is a big dust storm

which meteorologically is called a haboob.

The word has origins in the middle East

where they actually see

dust storms like this

but you can get them here in

the desert Southwest in the U.S

this can happen along a front, you know,

a big gust of wind that

comes from a cold front

or from a thunderstorm with cool air,

expanding outward from it,

basically a big gust of

wind blows over the desert,

and it picks up all the sand

and dirt and dust particles

and it lofts them into the air,

even a couple thousand feet into the air,

and it creates this big cloud

that's blowing towards you.

What you're really just

seeing is a big gust of wind

blowing towards you, but

it's visible all of a sudden

because there's all kinds

of dust and particles in it.

I don't know that there's a

much of a difference practically

between a dust storm and a sand storm,

maybe the size of the particles

that are being lofted.

Both dust and sand storms

create really low visibility,
Gusty winds, and actually
hazardous conditions.

[wind gushing]

- If a dust storm's ever

coming at you like that

going inside is the best case scenario.

If you are trapped outside in a vehicle,

you want to stop because you

won't be able to see much

all of a sudden when it hits.

If you're really outside walking in it,

you want to get eye protection

on as soon as you can.

You also want to maybe wrap

a cloth around your face

or have a face mask on of some sort

that'll protect your lungs from breathing

in those particles.

Dust storms can have winds of

maybe 30 or 40 miles per hour

maybe 50 miles an hour

in a really strong one

but they're not really

known for damaging winds

or strong winds.

They're just known for dropping visibility

and looking really

spectacular if you see one.

[wind gushing]

This is based on reality,

but it's dramatized a bit,

the lightning, there's no

reason there would be lightning

inside of a dust storm.

So that's one thing that's a
little bit inaccurate here.

So now it's almost like

he's breached the wall

of the dust storm and

now he's inside of it

and he can all of a sudden see everything,

that's not quite the way these

dust storms or haboobs work,

it would just be a constant cloud

of low visibility and dust.

You don't really get inside of it

and are all of a sudden able to see.

You would not have sand

tornadoes or dust tornadoes

inside of a dust storm.

There's no reason meteorologically

that you would ever have

a tornado inside of this.

A big wall of dust a big haboob

can blow across, you know

tens of miles or even 100s

of miles in a massive one,

but typically they last for

a pretty short amount of time

maybe an hour or two at the most,

the biggest ones, you can

actually see them from space

from satellites, if they're really wide

and they last for a little while.

But the smaller scale ones

may just be a few miles across

and last a shorter amount of time.

[wind gushing]
This is one of the more
unrealistic dust storms

I've seen in Hollywood movies.

When they were driving

outside of it, toward it,

it did look realistic

with a big, you know,

high and massive wall of dust.

But yeah, once you get inside

of it, the lightning is fake,

the good visibility that wouldn't happen,

and once you get inside of

it, these massive tornadoes

that would not happen either.

Probably one of the more

accurate things here

is that there can be this

reddish or orange hue

to the dust itself.

It just matters about

what color the land is

or what color the dust is

that that strong wind is picking up.

It looks like it's

illuminated by the sun here

which wouldn't be the case.

Just because of the low visibility

caused by the dust cloud itself.

Next up The Impossible.

[Water rumbling]

[glass shattering]

- The boys

This is quite realistic.

This is actually modeled after
the 2004 Indonesian tsunami,

one of the deadliest in history.

A tsunami is an under sea earthquake.

So in an earthquake two pieces of land

along a fault line in between them

are either displaced,

sideways or vertically.

And in this event, part of the

ground underneath the ocean

was displaced vertically all of a sudden,

more than a 100 feet.

So it's like if you took

half of your bathtub

split it into two and it's full of water

and then you lifted half of

your bathtub up really high

that water would slosh everywhere,

all of a sudden, right?

That's exactly what

happened in this tsunami.

And a tsunami wave is

not like a typical wave

that you can kind of dive through

and then come out the other

side, which goes like this

a tsunami wave is just an

increase in the level of the ocean

that just comes in like a wall

and it stays deep and high.

So it's not a wave that crashes

over you and then it's gone,

it's just like the ocean is

all of a sudden 20 feet higher,

and it bulldozes everything

that it takes over.

[footsteps thudding]

[ball bouncing]

[birds chirping]

- So before a tsunami
happens, oftentimes they say

that the animals know, or

the birds may be flying away,

but what you're seeing

here is actually it looks

like the wind was blowing

out toward the sea.

The ocean can often retreat

in advance of a big tsunami wave,

and that actually has a deadly effect.

All the tourists here in Indonesia

or wherever the tsunami may

be, flock out to the ocean

and they even walk in the sea

bed because this is so cool.

You know, the ocean is

disappearing, what's going on

but the ocean is only

drawing out to come back in,

in a major destructive, deadly way.

And that's what we're seeing here.

Predicting a tsunami is as hard

as predicting an earthquake.

There's actually this

Tsunami Warning Center

for the whole world that

operates out in the Pacific.

And all they do is monitor

earthquakes that happen

on the ocean bed or anything

close to the ocean bed

that could potentially cause a tsunami.

So if there's an earthquake
detected that they think

could cause a tsunami they'll

issue a tsunami warning

for the effected coast.

And in this case, folks did

not have much warning at all.

- Dad

[water rumbling]

- Tsunamis happen most

often in the Pacific basin,

as opposed to the Atlantic ocean,

although they can happen anywhere,

and the reason is we've all

heard of the ring of fire

which is the big fault line that circles

around the whole Pacific ocean.

That's kind of where most of

the Earth's active volcanoes

are, and that's where the

active fault lines are.

So that's where a lot of the

underwater earthquakes are.

But a tsunami, it's just a huge wave,

so where you are, it might

not last for that long

but it can propagate

across the whole ocean

for hours and hours, and

it's actually interesting

if you have a really deep ocean,

this tremendous amount of

energy in a tsunami wave
is actually just a few inches high

because it's kind of dispersed

throughout the depth of the ocean

from the floor up to the air we breathe.

If you're out on a cruise ship,

a tsunami might pass by you

at several 100 miles per

hour in the deep ocean

without you even noticing,

it's a tiny little wave

and then it's gone,

but as it approaches land, it slows down

and it builds up higher and higher

because the sea gets shallow.

So the tsunami, when it hits

shore, or a shallower ocean bed

they can be 20 feet high, 40 feet high

or even over 100 feet high

in the worst tsunamis.

So, you know, a big wave

crashing into a hotel like this

is absolutely realistic

and flowing water is

exponentially more powerful

than flowing air like wind.

So, you know, having a

chunk of water flowing

through a house at five miles

per hour or 30 miles per hour

whatever, it can wipe

everything off of the map,

as opposed to, you know,

a 30 mile per hour wind

which we can all sustain.

To prepare for tsunami you
just have to go to higher land

and hope that you have

enough time to get there.

If you're vacationing on the beach

like these unfortunate folks

were, and there is no warning

you probably will not survive a tsunami.

They're one of the least

survivable natural disasters

because of the power of the

water and the drowning risk.

tsunamis can certainly

travel a few miles inland

from the beach actually,

which is pretty terrifying

if you think about it, it

seems safe that far away,

but as long as the land is flat

and if the tsunami has the power to do so,

it will bulldoze everything

for several miles.

So a big powerful tsunami,

one of the most powerful

tsunamis we've ever seen

hitting a very flat land like

we are here in Indonesia,

it's really a worst case scenario.

Next up Dante's Peak.

[volcano erupting]

Great movie.

I think it's a lot of fun

and it also holds up pretty well today,

even though it's a little older,

the special effects are cool,

the volcano science seems

pretty realistic to me.

What we're seeing right

here is the volcano

kind of blowing its top.

So all the hot magma and gases

that are built up inside

of the earth, typically

they, for one reason or

another are exploding

out of the top of this mountain.

So that right there is

the pyroclastic cloud.

It's a cloud of super hot

gases from inside of the earth

and also ash and lava and pieces of rock

and all kinds of stuff.

It can rise actually at 400 miles per hour

and even expand outward at

several hundred miles per hour.

If the volcano is hot

enough and powerful enough

it can actually rise so high into the sky

and for so long,

it can actually create a

huge thunderstorm cloud

with particles bumping into

one another really fast

create electricity and

actually create lightning.

Like most natural disasters

geologists, and volcanologists

try to predict when a terrible

volcano is going to happen,
and that's actually the
premise of this movie.

We're still trying to do that.

Now, there are some markers

in the field of geology

that can tell you that a

volcano might be coming

but we still can't

predict with any accuracy

when or how bad a volcanic

eruption is going to be.

[glass shuttering]

[debris crushing]

[children shouting]

- Get down kids, get down.

- You know, a big violent

eruption with that kind of force

could certainly shatter buildings

or 18 wheelers or windows
that are in the way,

and he's telling the kids to get down.

There's not much you can do of course,

if you're in the path of

this pyroclastic cloud

or the pyroclastic flow of

magma and hot gas and ash

but he's probably telling them to get down

to stay away from the

windows of the vehicle

because there's flying debris

and that might help them a little bit.

So that can actually

expand outward that fast

and kind of come at you at

several 100 miles per hour.

The hot gases and ash, they're

rushing at them right now,

we're trying to get out of the

way, let's see what happens.

[lady screams]

[door shattering]

I don't think they'd be

able to out drive this

this hot cloud of gases

and ash coming at them.

When they're racing through the town here,

it looks like they might be going

like 40 or 50 miles an hour.

And you know, the force

of a volcano can certainly

expand outward faster than that

so they might be in trouble here.

Driving into a tunnel or

a mine shaft like that

might provide you some

protection from the debris

and from what's going on outside.

But you know, the direction

of the volcanic eruption

is still going into

that tunnel the same way

they drove as well so

I'm not sure they'd be

able to survive that

even in there.

- Next up, Crawl.

[Rain pattering]

- It looks like we're in the

middle of a hurricane here

in this movie.

Some parts are realistic,

some parts are not.

A hurricane is a low pressure system

a big organized, a 100

mile across storm or larger

that forms over the ocean.

And if the conditions are just right

and the water and the

ocean is warm enough,

the storm will keep swirling,

it'll keep big thunderstorms building

and it gets winds of 74

miles per hour or greater,

and then it becomes a hurricane.

This is actually pretty realistic

except it would be a little

bit windier than this.

I know from experience in a hurricane

it's almost impossible to stand up in.

They don't look too flustered by the wind

which they would be

but you also get what's called

the storm surge flooding

where if you live near the ocean

the level of the ocean actually rises,

and that happens for two reasons.

The wind from a hurricane piles

the whole ocean into the land.

Second of all, the lower

pressure in the atmosphere
inside of a hurricane actually exerts less

of a downward force on
the top of the ocean,

so if you're not pushing the

top of the ocean down as much,

believe it or not this

bubble of higher ocean levels

actually forms in the

middle of a hurricane.

That's from all the rising air,

the atmosphere is almost

lifting off of the earth itself.

So the ocean itself is able

to kind of lift up as well

and fill that void.

I wouldn't suggest walking through this,

you see the car starting to float away

even just a foot of moving

water can wash a car away.

Only six inches of flowing

water can wash me or you

off of our feet even

with our best efforts.

The other dangerous thing about this,

you don't want to be

outside in a hurricane

for obvious reasons, flying debris

but also because of power lines.

Water is a really good

conductor of electricity.

So if that wire is still

alive, it'll electrocute you.

If you're within even

a somewhat close radius

you don't even have to

be right next to it.
It's a little bright for a hurricane.

In a hurricane, the
visibility is really low,

you can't see the clouds,

everything is just gray

and swirling and blowing.

You don't have visibility

of the cloud basis

or have any bright spots from

the sun like you see here.

To prepare for a hurricane

if you live near the coast,

because remember they

only form over the ocean,

It's good to have a few

days supply of food, water

and a backup generator if you can,

to run some basic parts of your home

like maybe the air conditioner or lights

things that you need to survive.

Of course, if a really
powerful hurricane is coming

officials will issue

a voluntary evacuation

where you can leave if you

want, or a mandatory evacuation

if it's really dangerous

where you have to leave

and it's actually a crime to stay.

[rain pattering]

- The eye's above us.

- Yeah, so this is being in the hurricane.

I've only been in a hurricane eye at night

if you're in the eye of

a hurricane in the day

that's kind of a storm chaser

or a meteorologists dream

because you get this

spectacular visibility.

It is completely calm.

There's no wind or just a light breeze,

and the clouds around you

might be 45,000 feet tall

and you can actually see

all of them around you.

Very hard to get into

the eye of a hurricane.

Of course, most people

don't want to be there,

so not good for them.

The eye wall of a hurricane is actually

the most dangerous part, which

is, if you think of the eye

like a donut with the cutout

in the middle, the eye itself

the hole in the middle of

the donut is completely still

and it might be sunny and no wind at all.

But the donut itself

surrounding that circular eye,

that's the eye wall, and

that's the ring of terror.

That's, you know, where

the strongest winds are

the most lightning can be,

that's where all the

destruction takes place.

So that's another unrealistic thing.

If they walked outside just

before the eye got to them,
that means they walked
outside in the eye wall

which would have much, much stronger winds

and be much less survivable

than what we see here.

Next up, Everest.

[wind gushing]

It is quite realistic so far,

you can get a thunderstorm

in the mountains

with lightning and rain

like what is base camp

of Everest in this movie.

And then at higher elevations

you wouldn't experience that as rain,

it would be cold enough for snow

or little pellets of
ice to be hitting you.

Of course it would be
super windy in this storm

at such a high elevation

and you'd need to brace

yourself against the wind

and brace any exposed

skin from all that stuff,

flying at you in the air.

[wind gushing]

And this is what's less realistic.

If you're climbing Mount Everest

or in any high Alpine environment,

you don't want any of your skin exposed.

In an environment like this,

the wind chill is
constantly well below zero.

It could be 80 below zero

which will give your exposed

skin frostbite in just minutes

and also your eyes, you

would never uncover your eyes

whether it was sunny up

there or stormy up there.

If it's stormy and windy,

there's snow flying in your eyes.

The cold wind is really

harsh on your eyes,

so you need to protect them from that.

Even if it's sunny and a little less windy

it's so bright up there

because you're above like a

half of the Earth's atmosphere,

you're above it.

So there's little to protect

you from how bright the sun is.

Also, you've got a huge mirror

under you and all around you,

that's snow.

So you can actually go

snow blind they call it,

if you're not wearing

really good sunglasses

or really good goggles.

So in meteorology, the term

ice storm actually refers

to freezing rain, which is

not quite as exciting as this.

It's where you have really

cold air down at the ground

which is below freezing but

then up higher in the sky,

it's quite warm.

So if something falls from a cloud

it falls as a rain drop

and then it hits the ground

and then maybe the surface

of your car, or the road

or the bridge is below

freezing so it turns into ice

once it's on that surface.

An ice storm doesn't necessarily mean

that ice is falling from the cloud,

typically that's just

little pieces of snow

that are falling from a cloud.

[thunder rumbling]

What we are looking at here

is like a warm weather,

convective thunderstorm, these big,

it looks like a piece

of cauliflower, right?

But a huge piece of cauliflower.

The updrafts are really strong

so the cloud is growing and

mushrooming and blossoming.

It has really sharp edges on the cloud.

We call that a cumuliform cloud.

This only happens in warm,

moist tropical environments.

So this is a thunderstorm
you might see in Miami

or even in the Midwest that

could produce a tornado

but this is not the type of a thunderstorm

that you would see close to
Mount Everest and the Himalayas.

You can get lightning in

a mountain thunderstorm

even that high, but it won't be as common

and most storms that you'll

get on Mount Everest,

they don't look anything like this,

they're not pretty and have sharp edges

that you can see coming,

they're kind of just like a

blob of gray coming at you.

- We're going to go to
the south to get oxygen.

I'll go ahead and find oxygen.

- If you're climbing a mountain like this,

just the willingness to turn around

is how I would suggest preparing

for Mount Everest type of storms.

People have gotten in

trouble when they're stubborn

and there's a storm coming

and they're a 100 yards from the summit,

but you know a 100 yards

at 29,000 feet elevation,

takes you a while

because you got to walk

really, really slowly.

The willingness to turn around

is a good survival tactic

I think on Everest.

Lightning and thunder are much

more rare with snow storms.
That's why when you get
what's called thunder snow

it's a really exciting

thing for meteorologists.

Typically lightning and thunder

are more of a warm weather,

thunderstorm occurrence.

So there has been lightning

on Mount Everest before

it's more likely down at base

camp than it is on the summit,

but you know, in a storm like this

they're showing frequent lightning

and what looks like a

summer day thunderstorm

it just wouldn't quite be like that.

Thank you guys so much for

watching these clips with me,

I had a blast.

This has been my lifelong passion

so this is really what gets me excited

and hope you enjoyed it as well.

We'll see you next time.

[remote clicks]