Should Scientists Try to Prevent Hurricanes?

September 08, 2008

I know all of you out there are as relieved as I am that the city of New Orleans was spared this time by Hurricane Gustav, although we did have to endure a brief disruption of nonstop cable news coverage of the Republican National Convention . (Btw, for those of you who were deeply disappointed by the delay of former New York mayor and failed presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s keynote address, maybe this video clip of him discussing his views on readiness for a possible attack by space aliens will help fill the void.)

Even so, it’s truly scary to think about what might have happened, had Gustav lived up to its advance billing as the “storm of the century.” Here’s some footage of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina that is the stuff of nightmares.

I’m not knocking the crucial importance of hurricane preparedness. But in truth, there’s only so much you can do to prepare for an onslaught of water and moving air powerful enough to lift up a car and throw it into the lobby of a hotel. Which leads me to wonder: What if we had a way to prevent hurricanes or at least lessen their severity?

This turns out not to be a new idea. From 1962 to 1983, the U.S. government operated a research program called Project STORMFURY; its goal was to thwart hurricanes by artificially disrupting their internal structure. The researchers hoped to do this by flying an aircraft into a still-developing storm and seeding the clouds with silver iodide, the same chemical that Chinese weather modifiers shoot into the sky with artillery in an attempt to cause — or prevent — rainfall. (Here’s a previous blog that I wrote on their efforts to prevent rain at the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.) As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Web page on STORMFURY explains it:

The proposed modification technique involves artificial stimulation of convection outside the eyewall through seeding with silver iodide. The invigorated convection, it was argued, would compete with the original eyewall, lead to reformation of the eyewall at a larger radius, and thus, through partial conservation of angular momentum, produce a decrease in the strongest winds. Since a hurricane’s destructive potential increases rapidly as its strongest winds become stronger, a reduction as small as 10 percent would have been worthwhile.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Project STORMFURY researchers tried seeding four hurricanes on eight different days. On four of the occasions, it seemed to have no effect, but on the other four days, the hurricane winds actually decreased by more than 10 percent. In the case of one storm — Hurricane Debbie, in August 1969 — wind speeds fell by 31 percent with the first day of cloud seeding and 18 percent after a second day.

Unfortunately, in the early 1980s, Project STORMFURY’s apparent successes were called into question, when researchers observed some hurricanes naturally developing the weakened multiple eyewalls that supposedly had been caused by seeding. Its hypothesis seemingly debunked, the project was cancelled in 1983.

Nevertheless, the idea of controlling hurricanes through cloud seeding has never completely gone away. In a 2007 article for The Atlantic, writer Graeme Wood explains that

Most of the hurricanes that strike the United States are born off the coast of West Africa, and nursed on tropical waters. As air warmed over the Atlantic surges up to meet the cool atmosphere, its heat turns into kinetic energy, creating a violent twist of wind and rain. The bigger the temperature difference between the hot sea and the cold upper air, the more furious the storm can grow.

Climate scientists, aided by ever-more-powerful computer models, are investigating whether it’s possible to choke these storms slowly, during their long drift west. They want to attack big hurricanes from above or below, sapping the storms’ strength by either heating up their chilly tops or chilling their hot underbellies. According to some models, well-timed interventions could diminish a hurricane by 40 percent — enough to turn a possible Category 5 storm into a mere Category 2 or 3, which would break windows and wreck trailer parks but leave most buildings intact.

One group of scientists, headed by Israeli atmospheric scientist Daniel Rosenfeld, wants to attack the bottom of a hurricane, seeding it with 200 tons of microscopic dust particles. The idea is to get the storm’s water vapor to condense on the particles, forming small droplets that would be less likely to collide with other droplets to form raindrops. Instead, the droplets would rise with air molecules until they evaporate, which would cool the storm and deprive it of energy. In 2007, Rosenfeld ran a simulation of how this method might have worked, had it been used on Hurricane Katrina. The result: The radius of hurricane-force winds shrank by 25 percent, and the weakened storm curved north, missing New Orleans altogether.

Another team of scientists, led by Boston-based researchers Moshe Alamaro and Ross Hoffman, want to attack the hurricane’s top. They would disperse 125 tons of particles above the storm, essentially painting the upper layer of the storm black, so that it would absorb the sun’s heat, the way that dark shingles do on the top of a house. Warming the storm’s upper layer would reduce the contrast between top and bottom, changing the air flow within the hurricane and slowing its wind speed. Like Rosenfeld, Hoffman has gotten the method to work on a computer simulation of a hurricane. As Alamaro told The Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, in 2007:

"With small changes to this side or that side of the hurricane we can nudge it and change its track. We're starting with computer simulations, then will hopefully experiment on a small weather system."

The ability to reduce the power and alter the path of hurricanes could be a godsend to coastal cities such as New Orleans and Miami. While the news coverage of the two anti-hurricane approaches doesn’t estimate the cost, I’m guessing that the expense of putting 15 or 20 cloud-seeding planes in the air would be a bargain compared to the billions of dollars worth of property damage that could be avoided by thwarting a storm such as Katrina.

But the potential risks of tampering with hurricanes could also be enormous. Imagine the outcry — and the potential lawsuits — if scientists redirected a hurricane and caused it to miss one coastal city but hit another. Some might argue that we’d be better off spending money on beefing up the infrastructure in coastal areas to better withstand storms, instead of trying to play God.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Comments

[Joshua Riklis]

Here are a couple of other proposed anti-hurricane measures, that I found at
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/hurricane/dn7995-could-humans-tackle-hurricanes.html

In April 2005, Moshe Alamaro at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US, outlined a plan to use an array of floating jet engines to trigger miniature cyclones in the atmosphere ahead of a hurricane. The idea is to drain the ocean and atmosphere of energy before the hurricane arrives. But critics point out that even a large array of jet engines probably cannot inject enough energy into the atmosphere to trigger even a tiny storm.

Another strategy is to cover the ocean ahead of the hurricane with a thin layer of fish oil that disrupts the flow of energy into the atmosphere.

[Sarah Palin is more destructive to the environment than hurricanes]

She is, too.

[Storm Watcher]

Instead of attempting to alter hurricanes through cloud seeding, what if we worked to reduce their intensity by curbing global warming? I think this would be a more constructive solution.

[Moose]

I definately think the government should try to develop these methods for stopping, weakening and/or redirecting hurricanes. States like Florida are really at the mercy of these awful storms, which are incredibly destructive.

[Jim Rowing]

Why not harnes the energy! The east coast from NC to FL and the gulf coast could become the greatest power producing plants in the country.

[Anne Carmichael]

That's either a crazy idea or incredibly brilliant. But why not try to harness the power of storms?

[Joyce]

Is that even possible to do?

[Caffeine Driven Stress Magnet]

That sounds like a great topic for a future blog!

[Brent Harris]

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5f.html

Subject: C5f) Why don't you harness the energy of tropical cyclones?
Contributed by Neal Dorst

If someone can figure out a way to harness that energy, the more power to them. They could earn millions of dollars and the gratitude of everyone on the shore. Every dyne of energy harvested would be one less dyne blowing over trees.

The biggest technical impediment is that a hurricane's energy is low grade. It's abundant, but it's spread over a tremendous area. For energy to be high grade it should be concentrated, making it easy to gather and use. You would need a field of wind turbines covering dozens of square miles in order for it to be profitable. And it would have to be mobile, so you could intercept landfalling storms, or chase those that change direction. Of course, you have to expend energy to move them around, so you run the risk of losing money on the operation. The same is true of wave turbines plus you would need to find a way of anchoring them securely without compromising mobility.

It would be a daunting technical task, plus you have to worry about your turbines being robust enough to sustain damage from windblown debris and be able to transmit the energy gathered quickly. So after you draw up your engineering specs, you'd better have an investor or two, because it will cost you a great deal of money to build so many of these reinforced, mobile turbine units even before you collect you first erg.

[Ecologist]

I think harnessing the power of hurricanes is a great idea...the energy in a single hurricane would be more than enough to fill the entire energy consumption of everyone on the planet. There is a Canadian engineer named Louis Michaud who thinks he has found a way to do this.

Alternative energy

A new sort of wind power
Sep 29th 2005
From The Economist print edition

WEATHER systems, as the world has recently been reminded, have awesome power. The energy released by a large hurricane can exceed the energy consumption of the human race for a whole year, and even an average tornado has a power similar to that of a large power station. If only mankind could harness that energy, rather than being at its mercy. Louis Michaud, a Canadian engineer who works at a large oil company, believes he has devised a way to do just that, by generating artificial whirlwinds that can be controlled and harnessed. He calls his invention the “atmospheric vortex engine”.

His idea works on a similar principle to a solar chimney, which consists of a tall, hollow cylinder surrounded by a large greenhouse. The sun heats the air in the greenhouse, and the hot air rises. But its only escape route is via the chimney. A turbine at the base of the chimney generates electricity as the air rushes by. A small solar chimney was operated successfully in Spain in the 1980s, and EnviroMission, an Australian firm, is planning to build a 1,000-metre-high example in New South Wales.…

[Aupac]

What I think, we have to put something similar to "Crude Oil" which we extracted from underground, back underground. Because we are disturbing the natural rotation of the earth and accelerating the disasters awaiting us.

Some will have to learn what I am saying, but its the reality. Because of the sheer size of this planet, we think it is not affecting anything.

If we use temperature, like the sun and water, it's alright. But when we start to use chemicals, that is when we're making a very big mistake. The chemicals will disperse like carbon dioxide is doing along with GHG's, and make things worse. We have to use all natural ingredients, like plant more trees in the continent of Africa so that the intense heat will not create hurricanes, but will be absorbed by the trees and plants.

[Ian Baylis]

I believe that at first it may seem like a good idea but after a while tamping with the hurricanes may couse a strain on how the planet creates these huricanes.

If you coat the top of the atmosphere with 120 tones of dark particles so that they can obsorb the suns rays, depending on the typeof chemical, it may cause the storm to rain these particles.

If you heat the storm you could mess with the current of the storm

[TJ]

i think messing with hurricanes is a big mistake. mother nature creates them for a reason. humans are just trying to make this planet into their playground and it's only going to make things much worse.

[roop]

vow...
ridiculous.
i mean to say that these innovations are truly big.