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As a kid growing up in a small Texas farm town near Houston, Cameron Homeyer had a strong interest in both science and gardening. Both led to his fascination with the weather — especially after Tropical Storm Allison swept off the Gulf of Mexico in 2001, devastating southeast Texas. Allison dropped more than 40 inches of rain in the Houston area, causing more than 20 deaths and leaving about 30,000 people homeless.
Homeyer’s home was spared, but one of the minor impacts of the story was the complete destruction of his tomato garden, “just drowned, ruined completely,” he said, “and my interest in gardening drew me into the weather.”
Today, in his mid-30s, Homeyer is into the weather in a big way — interim head of school of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, one of the nation’s premier weather research institutions at a time when devastating weather events — floods, fires and violent storms — have become a pressing international concern.
Q: Here’s my first question for all the fans of the “Twister” movies. Can you really stop a tornado in its tracks? Is that something that might be possible some day?
A: I think there’s some legitimacy to being able someday to have some impact on the weather. But not at the scale that was in that movie. That was just movie magic. It’s not in the range of possibility. At least not now.
Q: So, as a scientist did you just laugh your way through the movie?
A: Well, there were points that you laugh at. But actually, there were quite a few people in this building that were consulted in the making of the movie, before the filming even started. Here and in the National Severe Storms Laboratory there was a lot of coordination between our staff, the actors and the whole production team. I think the second movie was much closer to reality than the first, much, much closer, even though the ability to halt the tornado with cloud modification is not in the range of possibility right now. But there is a long history of research on weather modification, most of it focused on fog suppression or precipitation generation.
Q: It would be great if you could make it rain where it’s needed and make stop in the case of some of the serious flooding we’ve seen lately.
A: It’s a scale problem really. We’ve had some success in efforts to dissipate fog around airports, but it has worked only in a small area and for a small window in time. Even if you were to load (chemicals into) a whole lot of missiles or something and launch them into a cloud, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and prevent 10 minutes of an event. All you can really do at this point, to mitigate the damage from these high impact events, is to work on becoming more resilient. So, updating building codes and practices, building a more resistant infrastructure is critical.
Q: So, if modifying the weather isn’t really practical today, that makes predicting what’s going to happen and when becomes all the more important.
A: That’s right. And we’ve gotten much better at making confident assessments about events that are going to occur. We’ve made tremendous progress on forecasting hurricanes, especially their path, recently. That’s due to advances in modeling and more observational capabilities, with more flights going into hurricanes than in the past. Also, super-cell storms. We’ve gotten quite good at warning about these storms with advanced lead time, and these are the ones that account for the most damage. However, what does remain very difficult is warning about tornadoes that occur within large storm systems, some with a leading line of thunderstorms. These storm systems are very significant tornado producers and often harder to predict.
Q: Is there any such thing as a “tornado alley” anymore? It used to be that if you lived in Kansas or Oklahoma, you were right in the middle of the tornado belt, or whatever you want to call it. But lately it seems like there have been a lot more tornadoes in different parts of the country.
A: Historically, the Great Plains, including Oklahoma and Kansas, have experienced more tornadoes, but it’s also true that there’s a very high density of tornadoes that extends in the southeastern United States. A lot of research is focused today on why tornadoes form exactly where they do and how do they evolve. That is really important. We’ve gotten good at identifying favorable conditions and favorable storms for tornado genesis, but the exact point at which a storm makes a tornado is still uncertain.
Q: In view of the ongoing discussion about climate change, have you seen a growing interest in the study of meteorology?
A: Yes, definitely. Our enrollment is up. Historically, we’ve had somewhere between 250-300 students, but we’re now well over 300 and we may exceed 400 next year. Our faculty has grown quite a bit in the past five years. Some of this is attributed to the “Twisters” movies. We had a 20% enrollment increase after the original film.
Q: How do you see the science developing in the future? Do you anticipate more use of Artificial Intelligence in making predictions? Do you see more focus on weather and how it influences agriculture, business, city planning and other areas?
A: With AI, the attraction is all about doing a lot of tasks in a very efficient manner with computing resources. To train and build those models can be quite expensive, but it makes access possible to the scales of prediction that get down to being able to predict tornadoes within storms. I think there is a growing interest in our discipline right now. As long as the population is growing, it will be difficult to avoid the fact that more and more people are going to be experiencing the impact of weather because more of the surface is being developed. The more development, the greater chance that something will be in the path of these weather events. That’s why we have to build infrastructure that is more resilient, or we’ll have to deal with more and more losses year after year.
This article has been edited for length and clarity.
William C. Wertz is deputy Viewpoints editor. You can reach him with comments and story ideas at wwertz@oklahoman.com. Send him a note if you have any suggestions about others in the community our readers should “get to know.“
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