Sunday Feature: Review of "In the Eye of the Storm"

This Discovery Channel series, In the Eye of the Storm, depicts major storms and storm situations across the United States. It did a pretty good job (grade B) but it really needed a meteorologist-editor because there were so many unnecessary errors that were, at least to this meteorologist, annoying. I'm hoping that there will be a second year and I offer some suggestions for improvement. 

A recurring minor annoyance. Use of a backward hurricane symbol (it shows clockwise rotation rather than counterclockwise which occurs in the Northern Hemisphere) when discussing tornadoes and other types of storms. Example below.

It would be better not to use a hurricane symbol when discussing tornadoes. 

In the episode about the horrible Buffalo blizzard of 2022 (47 killed in Buffalo, 100+ total from the blizzard), there was a story about wonderful people who went out into the extreme cold and snow to rescue a man who was freezing and trapped. They asked for help to get him to a hospital by putting messages on Twitter and Facebook. If they called 9-1-1 it was not mentioned.

During instances like these -- and there were several instances in the various episodes -- it would be beneficial to put information such as "9-1-1 should be called first and only then use social media" in the form of superimpose over the lower-third of the screen.  It should also have given brief information about what to do for someone with severe frostbite before help arrives. If done as a lower-third superimposure, it would not interfere with the flow of the story. 

There were several cases shown of multi-vehicle pileups on icy interstate highways. It wasn't explained why the roads were not closed much earlier. 

There are numerous small errors in the episode about the Texas and Kansas tornadoes. For example, regardless of the headlines in the episode, the storms discussed weren't even close to being a single storm system. They were separated by more than a month.

As a meteorologist who worked both the 1991 Andover Tornado and studied the 2022 tornado, this error superimposed on the screen is pretty major:

Surprisingly, the warnings were better in the 1991 tornado by a pretty big margin. The reason there were 17 deaths in the 1991 Wichita-Andover Tornado were because it was a physically larger F-5 intensity storm, it struck a mobile home park (the park had a community shelter) but there were people who were deaf/blind and another with very limited mobility among those killed. The Centers for Disease Control did its first-ever study of tornado mortality of the '91 storm and found the warnings saved 70+ lives. 

The 2022 Andover tornado was a much narrower EF-3 storm that did not hit a mobile home park. The official "lead-time" (interval of time between the warning and the tornado touching down) for the 1991 was 5+ minutes while the 2022 tornado was zero (the tornado touched down simultaneously with the warning).

There are many more of these errors but you get the idea. While this season of In the Eye of the Storm is finished, I'm confident there will be reruns. There's no reason these errors should continue into a second season if Discovery should produce one. I hope a second season is forthcoming.