While global warming has led and may lead to different weather phenomena in the future, raining flesh eating sharks is not one of those. However, Sci-Fi’s original movie “Sharknado” portrayed that exact scenario. A land falling hurricane in Los Angeles spawned shark-sucking tornadoes that swept into Hollywood leaving Tara Reid and the bunch scrambling for safety as they fight off flying sharks. While its awful, yet extremely entertaining acting and plot made for a good laugh, the lack of physical and meteorological accuracy was nothing to joke about. Let’s examine a few (of the many) meteorological flaws in the movie “Sharknado”.
First off, there was a land falling hurricane in Los Angeles:
While this is not completely farfetched, the last tropical storm to hit Long Beach was in 1939, and the last hurricane to make landfall in southern California was in 1858. So, yes it has happened, but a storm as strong as was portrayed with the kind of flooding and tornadoes is not realistic. The main reason for this is the California Current, which basically keeps water temperatures cold year round. Since hurricanes feed off warm water, any tropical systems which approach southern California loose strength rapidly.
Tornadoes were powerful enough to suck sharks into their circulation and carry them onto land, resulting in “Sharknadoes”:
Marine Biology aside (with sharks surviving miles after miles out of water and in a tornado), let’s discuss if a tornado is indeed capable of lifting sharks out of the water to begin with. Tornadoes can produce wind speeds over 300 mph which is enough to peel up asphalt and destroy buildings, however, they occur over land. Over the ocean, tornadoes (which are technically waterspouts) are generally much weaker. So, can a shark-sucking tornado occur? Not really, but there have been very isolated reports of tornadoes dropping 2 to 9 inch long fish onto land.
The cast drops bombs into the tornadoes to not only kill the sharks, but also based on the theory that the bomb's heat will equalize the mixture of warm and cold air that spawned the tornadoes in the first place.
Meteorologically speaking, a tornado needs instability (heat and moisture) and rotation to form and maintain itself. The entrainment of cold air is often what causes a tornado to dissipate, not warm air (i.e. from a bomb). In reality, dropping a bomb into a tornado would likely not affect it, and in theory, if it did anything would actually help strengthen it by adding heat and therefore more instability.
