meembo

I remember people talking about this twenty-five years ago (now, that's dating yourself!). An article in USAToday says it's like trying to stop an elephant by throwing a ping-pong ball at it. Hurricanes cover tens of thousands of square miles, and the heat energy released by a hurricane absolutely dwarfs our most powerful explosives, thousands of times over. A bomb detonation would just render the storm radioactive as well.

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nukeu666

bombing a tornado would be feasible coz its smaller...few feet to a dozen feet wide at the eye...tho you would have to be able to predict where one would be making a touchdown
a hurricane eye is miles wide...only a nuke would do the job...but then better hurricane then a nuke...usually

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MSD

If that energy is dissipated into turbulent flow rather than an organized system, it will collapse on itself with a net increase in entropy.

I've been reading Chaos by James Gleick, and I've been pondering the effect of chains of massive fuel-air bombs on hurricanes. Instead of hitting the eye, I took into consideration that there are many warm and cold areas within a hurricane, and that air spirals in toward the eye. If we were to disrupt several lines of air into the eye, I think that htere's a potential not to destroy the hurricane, but to divert it by throwing it off-balance. The basic idea is that sustaining turbulent flow in a confined but unbounded area requires much more energy than sustaining ordered flow.

It's all working out in my head, but there's probably something I'm missing.

Phage

You are missing the jillion fuel air bombs required to significantly change the system. You need a lot of energy, more than you realise.

Your idea of disrupting the energy lines of the system has merit but it would probably be better to start earlier and in a different way. I was thinking of something along the lines of massive reflective oil slicks to lessen the heating of ocean water in certain areas during certain building cycles, which could significantly decrease the strength of a potential storm if not prevent some completely.

MSD

I was thinking about minor alterations of its course as it starts up, before it's a full-force storm. I was considering doing this to a tropical depression when it was still a manageable size. It would still take a lot of energy (as far as I know, fuel-air results in the most concussive force short of anyhting nuclear) but the cost of disrupting a storm could be less than the potential loss of life and property.

Phage

Concussive force is useless, remember we are talking about air formations here. Creating pressure waves is not going to do anything (except perhaps squeeze some moisture from the air temporarily). After you have set off your bombs the air is still going to be about in the same place as before.

yournamehere

I believe that, under the rules of the present administration, the only logical reason to bomb a hurricane would be if we were attacked by an earthquake.

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Ustwo

Ok so now our misguided scientist is using fuel air bombs, we can still do the movie!

(Odds are messing with something like a hurricane is BAD)

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cyrnel

News events of the past couple days have convinced me our best weapon to minimize hurricane damage and fatalities would be to drop a 10MP/B bomb (MP/B=Million Politician/Bureaucrat) in the hurricane eye, ideally while it's still at sea. Of course, being unable to locate 10 million of the asses should in no way prevent us from making a best effort attempt.

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Redlemon

Since there doesn't seem to be much of an overlap between Slashdot and TFP, here's a link to Scientific American: Controlling Hurricanes from last year. I'm too tired to figure out the conclusions, I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

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maleficent

There was some made for television disaster movie on last year - i think with dana delaney as the beautiful, brilliant, and misunderstood scientist, where there was an earthquake threatning to destroy the west coast (in fact, it took out the space needle) A well placed nuclear weapon stopped the earthquake before it got any worse...

/me hates insomnia they play the worst movies at 3am

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meembo

I saw this in the paper today (The Hartford Courant). I found it online, but I can't find a link that works without a membership.



Hurricanes Defy Attempts At Control

Scientists Say Storms Too Powerful To Divert
September 23, 2005
By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, Associated Press

It sounds like a great idea: Let's just blast hurricanes like Rita and Katrina out of the sky before they hurt more people. Or, at least weaken the storms and steer them away from cities.

Atmospheric scientists say it's wishful thinking that we could destroy or even influence something as huge and powerful as a hurricane.

They abandoned such a quest years ago after more than two decades of inconclusive government-sponsored research.

Private companies have conducted tests on a much smaller scale, but have made little progress despite initially claiming to erase storm clouds from the atmosphere.

"It would be like trying to move a car with a pea shooter," said hydrometeorologist Matthew Kelsch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. "The amount of energy involved in a hurricane is far greater than anything we're going to impart to it."

The federal government's hurricane modification program was called Project Stormfury. The idea was raised during the Eisenhower administration after several major storms hit the East Coast in the mid-1950s, killing 749 people and causing billions in damage.

But it wasn't until 1961 that initial tests were conducted on Hurricane Esther with a Navy plane releasing silver iodide crystals. Some reports indicate winds were reduced by 10 percent to 30 percent.

During Stormfury, scientists also seeded hurricanes in 1963, 1969 and 1971 over the open Atlantic Ocean far from land.

Researchers dropped silver iodide, a substance that serves as an effective ice nuclei, into clouds just outside of the hurricane's eyewall. The idea was that a new ring of clouds would form around the artificial ice nuclei. The new clouds were supposed to change rain patterns and form a new eyewall that would collapse the old one. The re-formed hurricane would spin more slowly and be less dangerous.

Sometimes, the experiments appeared to work. Hurricane Debbie in 1969 was seeded twice over four days by several aircraft. Researchers noted that its intensity waxed and waned by up to 30 percent.

For cloud seeding to be successful, clouds must contain sufficient supercooled water that is still liquid even though it is below 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

Raindrops form when the artificial nuclei and the supercooled water combine.

But scientists also learned that hurricanes contain less supercooled water than other storm clouds, so seeding was unreliable. And, hurricanes grow and dissipate all on their own, even forming new walls of clouds called "concentric eyewall circles."

This made it impossible to determine whether storm reductions were the result of human intervention. Project Stormfury was abandoned in the 1980s after spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

Other storm modification methods that have been suggested include cooling the tropical ocean with icebergs and spreading particles or films over the ocean surface to inhibit storms from evaporating heat from the sea.

Occasionally, somebody suggests detonating a nuclear weapon to shatter a storm.

Researchers say hurricanes would dwarf such measures. For example, Hurricane Rita measures about 400 miles across.

According to the center for atmospheric research, the heat energy released by a hurricane equals 50 to 200 trillion watts or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.

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