SHARKNADO!

"What's wrong?" "Your son wants to go in a helicopter and drop a bomb into a tornado."

Well, there's a whole lot more wrong with the movie... or, at least, the science part of the movie. Otherwise, Syfy's attempt to make the quintessential B-movie went very, very beautifully right.

Anyone who lives in LA can tell you that one of the most ridiculous parts of the movie - aside from the idea that these sharks aren't too disoriented by being thrown around by a tornado to still eat people - is the amount of LA that's covered in water. If you're not familiar, the term for rising waters caused by a hurricane hitting the land is called "storm surge."

So first of all, the storm surge is causing flooding Santa Monica. While this may be plausible for the most low-lying beach residences, anyone who's been in town knows that "ground level" for anything that's not on the sand is pretty high: This awesome website gives us an elevation of 16 meters, or 54 feet, at the location where Colorado Blvd and Ocean Blvd cross over the PCH. Anyways, this remarkably high storm surge causes someone to worry about his ex-wife and child, who are over six miles inland, and probably at least a hundred feet higher.

Someone helpfully gives us a reference for where the next scenes will take place, by saying "Take the 10 to the 405, that's almost to Beverly Hills, and there's no way the storm has gone that far inland." But, we see that that character is wrong, and the waves are crashing over the 405.

So how far has the storm surge risen by now? According to that handy elevation website, the elevation where the 10 crossed the 405 is 49 meters, or 160 feet. According to Google Maps, this is between 3.5 and 4 miles directly from the beach.

It gets even better a little later, when someone says "We have to go to Van Nuys to get Matt!" Going back to that amazing GPS website, that helps us determine that the Van Nuys airport is a whole 235 meters (or 771 feet) above sea level.

Why did I choose the airport? Well, when they find Matt, someone explains "Instead of letting live sharks rain down on people, we're going to get into the chopper, and drop BOMBS into the tornado!" because something about cold and warm air and "maybe bombs will equalize that." What. That's just too much for me to get into right now.

So how ridiculous is that level of storm surge?

In NOAA's website about storm surge, most of the heights appear to be between 10-20 feet, with the higher ones reaching well over 20 feet. The highest in the US happened during Hurricane Katrina at 27.8 feet, and the highest in the world has been estimated at potentially up to 48 feet, although this figure is disputed as it was calculated over 100 years ago, and the highest measured in recent years was only 34.8 feet.

So while the water reaching Santa Monica could be *almost* plausible in a super-hurricane-disaster movie, the idea of it flooding Westwood/Beverly Hills is very far off.

And, just because I don't get a lot of opportunities to post non-copyrighted photos on here, here's one that yours truly took while stopping at Savannah, GA during spring break one year:

"That's a tiger shark!" "How do you know that?" "Shark Week."