This week Morning Brief reader Lynda Buckler writes, "I’ve wondered why a plane couldn’t fly above a tornado cloud and drop something into the cloud to disperse the funnel? I read of tornados traveling miles and miles with destruction in their path…so?"

Senior Digital Meteorologist Jonathan Belles: Well, just to begin historically, I’m not aware of anyone attempting to divert a tornado, but we have diverted rain clouds.

In fact, this has famously been done around the Olympics. Basically, the idea is that you want good weather for the Olympic games, so we want the rain that would normally fall to fall out somewhere else.

China has done this a couple of different times. What they're doing is seeding clouds. Basically, a plane injects molecules into the clouds to make them heavier and cause the water molecules to fall out sooner. Typically, they're 100 miles upwind of where the storm would normally go. They seed the clouds and make them rain out before they get into the area that would be impacted.

In theory, I think it's possible to apply that kind of technology to a tornado. You're just trying to get the storm to rain itself out. Tornadoes need thunderstorms. Thunderstorms need rain. And rain, obviously, needs moisture. You're trying to take one of those ingredients away from those thunderstorms, so that they can be less successful at producing a tornado later on.

The problem with a tornado is a much, much smaller scale. They don't last very long in a thunderstorm or a big thunderstorm complex. Tornadoes may only last a couple of minutes. Sure, a rare one may go for more than 100 miles, but you still have to scramble the plane, arrange all of the ingredients to get the cloud seeding done, and get the pilot into the correct spot. So it's very, very tricky, I think.

In the film Twisters in 2024, part of the plot is some kind of idea about being able to stop a tornado. Basically they are forcing the molecules to be too heavy, so that they'll fall out. The video effects in the film are a little pseudoscience-y. They show the actual thunderstorm complex doing, like, a little donut and falling to the ground. It's not probably how that would end up working, but, basically the idea is the same as the cloud seeding in China that I mentioned.

If we somehow got 50 years down the line, totally hypothetical here, into the pattern of seeding every storm or every storm system that came across the Plains to produce tornadoes, we would be producing rain in the Rockies or fundamentally changing the climate of some other location. Do you want all of that water coming down into Denver, because we want to possibly stop a tornado in Kansas? Probably not. Somebody's going to be mad about that. We'd be adding rain somewhere and taking it away from somewhere else. So, we’d just be moving the problem from one place to another, right?

But I do think this will be an ongoing discussion for the end of time.

Do you have a question to ask the meteorologists at Weather.com? Write to us at [email protected] and we’ll pick a new question each week from readers to answer.