Is into the storm based on a true story

Only in the movies could anyone survive running around in the open in close proximity to a tornado, as nearly everyone in Into the Storm seems compelled to do. You can chalk that up to dramatic license, but how do the movie's tornadoes compare to real-world weather?

"I've seen various opinions of the movie from meteorologists, actually quite a range of opinions," says Gregory Carbin, Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center.

So let's break down the good and the bad.

The Tornado Outbreak

Film: The action in Into the Storm centers on a storm system that drops a series of tornadoes on an unfortunate town in Oklahoma.

Fact: When conditions are right, a large severe weather system really can spawn several tornadoes in a single day. This kind of event is known as a tornado outbreak, and the National Weather Service (NWS) offers a list of the 32 biggest outbreaks on record. For instance, the Palm Sunday outbreak, in April 1965, produced 51 tornadoes in the Midwest and Great Lakes region, including 6 in Wisconsin alone. On the afternoon of May 3, 1999, 50 tornadoes struck Oklahoma and another 20 touched down in Kansas.

In real life, tornado outbreaks are usually spread across a wide area, often several states. Eight tornadoes sweeping through one small town on the same afternoon is improbable, though not impossible. On May 9, 1986, nine tornadoes touched down in Dallas County, Iowa between 6:30 and 8:00 p.m.

Quadruple Tornado

Film: At one point in the movie, four tornadoes touch down within seconds of each other, effectively surrounding the protagonists.

Fact: Some tornadoes consist of several vortices that move around a common center. These multiple-vortex tornadoes may look like several tornadoes that happen to have touched down close to one another. For instance, the tornado that struck Joplin, Mo., in May 2011 appears to have been a multiple-vortex tornado.

According to the Storm Prediction Center, large, intense tornadoes may also give rise to smaller "satellite" tornadoes. These smaller tornadoes are separate from the larger tornado but usually seem to orbit it.

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Into the Storm - Official Main Trailer [HD]

Merging Tornadoes

Film: Later in the movie, two large tornadoes collide and merge into one enormous wedge-shaped tornado.

Fact: This probably could not happen the way it does on-screen. However, vortices in a multiple-vortex tornado do sometimes merge.

"If you think of the multiple vortex tornado where basically there's this large parent vortex or circulation, with smaller satellite circulations orbiting the larger vortex, those are basically going to be pulled into the larger vortex and merge with it," Carbin tells Popular Mechanics. Unlike in the movie, however, drawing in a smaller vortex doesn't noticeably strengthen or weaken the larger one.

Fire Tornado

Film: When one of the tornadoes in Into the Storm tears through a large pile of burning debris, it sucks the flames into the funnel and becomes a fire tornado.

Fact: The scene is similar to a video captured in March 2014, in which a controlled burn near Denver, Colo. spawned a flaming vortex. Fire tornadoes, also called fire whirls or fire devils, are rare, but they form in the same basic way as ordinary dust devils. If a small patch of hot air rises quickly enough through the cooler air above and around it, it can become a rotating column of air which picks up dust and small debris. In a fire tornado, the fire itself heats the rising air, and the vortex carries flaming material aloft.

Real tornadoes form due to similar processes of air circulation, but on a much larger scale, so they tend to be larger, more powerful, and longer-lasting. There is no proof that a real tornado has ever caught fire by pulling flaming debris into its vortex.

Eye of the Storm

Film: The center of a massive tornado is portrayed as similar to the eye of a hurricane, and storm chaser Pete actually refers to this calm center as the eye several times during the movie.

Fact: Any lull in the center of the vortex probably won't last long enough to notice. Although the largest tornadoes may be over a mile wide, the average is just a few hundred feet in diameter, according to the National Weather Service.

"I've heard accounts where people look up in the tornado and if the tornado is large enough, they can actually look up into the center of the tornado," Carbin says. But he adds, "Any calm or general quietness or lull in the center of the tornado is not likely to last very long at all because that center is so small."

Into the Storm doesn't depict the dramatic drop in air pressure that happens in vortex of a tornado, but it likely would have had an impact on the movie's characters. Carbin said, "The change in atmospheric pressure is so great that it can cause the eardrum to pop, and I've heard stories of people going through that."

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