If you want to know more about tornadoes, see some more terrifying pictures and
videos, or read about the real-life scientists who risk their lives chasing
these deadly storms, try following some of these links...
EarthWatch Communications is an
excellent source of severe weather imagery, including tons of GOES-8 satellite
(mentioned in Twister) images from around the world updated every hour. You can
also download a quicktime movie of the last 12 hours of cloud imagery over the
U.S. (only 220k). Stormwatch converts National
Weather Service weather watches and warnings into regularly updated graphical
displays.
You can access the vast resources of the Weather Channel online, including national maps, current conditions, and forecasts for over 900 cities in the United States.
The Storm Spotter's
Guide: Very cool computer graphics showing what tornados are, as well as
ominous pictures of different types of tornados. The force of a twister is best
illustrated here by a photograph of a car threaded through a tree. Also
includes a glossary.
Storm Chaser's Home Page:
Vast amounts of information about storm chasers. Find out how they do their job
safely
and ethically. If
you're having trouble, this site includes a glossary as well.
The Weather
Center: This page will let you look at some of the places actually featured
in Twister, including the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and the Next
Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) Operational Support Facility. More images
from NEXRAD and NOWRAD are available at the Doppler 6 Weather Center
Online.
One of the main plots of Twister involves developing a way to measure the
inside of a tornado. Until that becomes a reality, scientists rely on computer
simulations like this
one. The Doppler On Wheels
radar development project has also constructed a portable, pencil-beam, x-band
Doppler radar to measure tornados.
Mississippi State
University Climatology Laboratory: The "severe weather information" section
contains the latest tornado warnings, a regional radar image for the southeast,
and images from GOES-8, a satellite mentioned throughout the film.
The National Weather Service: Your tax
dollars at work. The Interactive
Weather Information Network page is especially interesting (a text version is
available as well), and it contains all of the current active severe weather
warnings.
To read about some real-life storm chasers, you can check out storm
chaser/photgrapher Warren
Faidley, who worked on Twister, or the Texas Severe Storms Association
(TESSA).
There are several good all-purpose weather pages on the Internet. One is Weather Net, which includes
forecasts for various cities as well as radar and satellite images, weather
maps, and even weather software. Most interesting are the WeatherCams, which
let you view live images of the weather all over North America. Make sure
there's not a tornado nearby. (If there is, you should quickly fill out a Severe
Weather Report Form, with which you can report an actual tornado. Not for
kids.)
Another good weather page is the Weather
Underground, which can tell you the latest weather conditions accross
America. This page is associated with the University of Michigan's weather
page, which has weather imagery, current conditions, forecasts, and curriculum
activities aimed at K-12 classrooms.
NBC's Intellicast lets you check the
weather anywhere in the world. Intellicast is run the by the WSI Corporation, which supplied real-time weather data and graphics during the filming of Twister.
Penn State's page is highly detailed
and perhaps a bit technical, but has a QuickTime VR movie of world weather
every 24 hours, and you can submit your own local weather observations.
And until storm chasers' research really allows scientists to predict severe
weather, you'll need to read this Severe Weather Safety
Guide to find out what to do in the event of a tornado or hurricane.
(Technical information on storm prediction can be found at the Center for Analysis and Prediction of
Storms.)
A historical archive of tornadoes, listed by state and territory, can be found
at the Storm Prediction
Center's Historical Toranado Data Archive.
Also look at the World Wide Web Virtual Library's entry on Meteorology,
indexed by type of information, geographical area, maps, forecasts, reports,
raw data, satellite images, groups & activities.
And if all that isn't enough for you, the Maryland
Earthcast can tell you just about anything that's happening on the planet
(also available in a low fat
version.)
TM & ©
1996 Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures
