Customer Reviews

Raging Planet:Tornado [VHS]

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We borrowed this video from our library, and were so pleased we are considering buying it. We have a budding storm chaser in the family and, while this video may not contain detailed scientific data, it contains tons of great footage for the eager viewer. Many Tornado movies, documentaries, etc contain more diagrams, interviews, and story build-up than tornado footage. They are often disappointing for those who want to see the awesome spectacle of a tornado. Not this video! Footage abounds!

If you want scientific explanations, go read a book.
If you want tornado footage, watch this video!

This instalment in the "Raging Planet" series is not a bad introduction to tornadoes, but is lacking in some areas, and has some flaws, too.

We're given an adequate idea of the science of tornadoes: how they form, and where; research; forecasting methods; etc. It also goes into recent (being relative to when this was made - 1995-7) tornado occurrences, like the Jarrell, TX tornado of May 27, 1997, and the outbreak around Pampa, TX, on June 8, 1995.

However, there's little depth to this, especially compared to other episodes in this series. The only coverage of historical tornadoes - the first tornado preparedness film from 1956, and three films of tornadoes from 1951/3/5 - is lifted DIRECTLY out of the (far superior) "Tornado Video Classics 1." (If you don't believe me, look in the bottom-left hand corner, where the number code from TVC1 has been fogged over.)There is little about the storm environment(we don't know WHERE in a supercell the tornado forms - that animation doesn't tell you everything) And, more frustratingly, there are inaccuracies: concepts important to tornadoes are given passing mentions(we're told that a wall cloud is "the final sign a tornado is about to form," but not that the tornado descends from it - but anyway, it's not a "final sign" since a wall cloud won't always spawn a tornado; we see that radar scanning a tornado shows "a well-developed hook" - which means nothing really, since the fact that it reveals rain wrapping around a mature mesocyclone - and thus, one more likely to produce a tornado - is not mentioned  and anyway, a hook echo only registers on conventional radar, not the all-important Doppler); stormchasing is glorified(you _won't_ see a tornado on every chase you go on), and in a bad way, as the activities of the VORTEX team on 6/8/95 are ignored, and Bruce Haynie, not Tim Marshall, saw the scoured concrete, among other errors; but - worst of all - the Fujita Scale is illustrated by tornadoes, which completely defeats its purpose: the F-scale is based on the DAMAGE a tornado does, not its APPEARANCE!(Indeed, the example this gives of an F-5 [near Hoover, TX, 6/8/95] was actually rated F-1 by the NWS because it did no F-5 damage. Just because it looks like a "mile-wide wedge" doesn't mean it's an F-4 or 5.)

Despite this, "Raging Planet: Tornado" makes an agreeable _basic_ introduction to tornadoes. With a greater amount of information available on tornadoes, you're more likely to find out how the F-scale works, or about historical tornadoes, anyway. Think of this as a starting point.