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Controlling Hurricanes?
Phil Shapiro writes "With the cost of hurricane Katrina running as high as $100 billion, the thought of trying to control the severity of hurricanes should be mulled. Dissipating the energy of hurricanes as they're forming might be within the range of the feasible.
Scientific American tackles this topic in an article last year, as does this crank. (I admit the crank is me.) Is this type of thing feasible, or is it best not even tried at all?"
This strikes me as the perfect segue from Bad Science in the Press.
-ShadowRanger
How about a hurricane *generator*.. but make it go in the exact opposite of the target storm.. now that'd be something I'd wanna see
Perhaps we should just try to take predictions of hurricanes more seriously? Katrina was predicted, both as a long-range risk and some days before it hit. The damage would have been considerably reduced if the levees hadn't broke.
This is a common question and there were indeed some experiments at hurricane modification. Most of the common ideas, including some of the ones that the original author proposes, are explained it the NOAA FAQ on tropical storms in the section TROPICAL CYCLONE MODIFICATION AND MYTHS.
and Katrina happened to get so large so fast just because we hadn't had other hurricanes to bleed off the heat in the Gulf's water. What everyone seems to forget is that if Global Warming were causing more hurricanes, which it isn't as we are on or below average across the last 20 or so years, is that the number of cyclones and typhoons would have to increase as well, which they haven't.
As for the hybrid versus SUV debate. Keep your damn hybrids, veritable ecological disasters on wheels. The current generation are nothing more than marketing gimmicks.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
No, this should not be attempted. Not now, not ever. Weather has one of the key properties of a chaos: Sensative dependance on initial conditions. This property gives rise to the proveriable butterfly flapping it's wings in China could cause a hurricane in the US. People make the mistake of thinking that if we could just introduce a tiny change to counteract the butterflies wings we could easily avoid the hurricane. This is wrong headed. Sure, me breathing on my keyboard right now may well stop a hurricane occuring in the US but I have no way of knowing this. The same errors that make weather prediction so difficult also apply to weather prevention. You can't really predict how your changes will effect the weather any longer than a few days in to the future and this makes it essentially useless.
That's not all. Think of the political implications. Say the US was unable to stop a hurricane but could divert it in to Mexico instead. This could be considered an act of war. A hurricane's energy is equal to detonating a low yield nuclear war head every second for hours on end. Diverting this incredible destructive energy to impact on another country would almost certainly lead to war.
Finally, hurricanes occur naturally. Even the strong ones, like Katrina, are a neccessary saftey valve on global climate. If you could in principle dissipate the energy of a strong hurricane that energy has to go somewhere and I bet it stays in the Atmosphere. It's like the fire safety camapaigns in the states where they put out forest fires all through the 60-80s. Eventually, there was so much debris on the forest flaw that when it inevitably caught fire we got huge "superfires" that were very difficult to put out and damaged a lot of property. I would conjecture that if we did somehow manage to stop hurricanes, eventually, we'd get a super hurricane of incredible strength that releases all that unspent energy. Not a nice prospect..
Simon
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I just want to know how this would affect the "Hurricane Rains" those of us in the MidWest recieve from hurricanes that form in the Gulf.
Without those hurricanes, how will we get those rains?
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
No little wind farm, or even (on our scale) massive wind farm is going to change this.
Wouldn't you just have to find the right butterfly, then swat the little bugger before if flaps it's wings?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Suppose we were able to steer a hurricane in a limited way using any of these water temperature techniques.
Suppose also that there is a hurricane headed for a major city - say, Miami or New Orleans. And we employ this steering mechanism.
The result is now that some agency decided that a smaller community - say, Mobile AL or Pensacola - bears the brunt of a hurricane instead of the larger city.
Wouldn't the residents of the affected area have some serious legal recourse against whomever "steered" the storm toward them? Is this steering ethical, given that we're essentially choosing one group of people to sustain hardship and death over another?
What about military use of this technology? Instant economic catastrophe for regimes you happen not to care for, whether you're in a shooting war or not. Or even political - making sure a red state gets the storm rather than a blue state. Given the current polarity of American politics, I could certainly see such a decision being made in a smoky backroom somewhere - buried so deep it'll never see the light of day.
Until these storms can be eradicated completely - the ethical and moral questions related to affecting a storm's path and the potential for misuse of that technology would seem to outweigh its usefulness.
Found this interesting reply to the parent, from our good friends at NOAA...
Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by (fill in the blank)?
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5f.html
There have been numerous techniques that we have considered over the years to modify hurricanes: seeding clouds with dry ice or Silver Iodide, cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs, changing the radiational balance in the hurricane environment by absorption of sunlight with carbon black, exploding the hurricane apart with hydrogen bombs, and blowing the storm away from land with giant fans, etc. (Some of these have been addressed in detail in this section of FAQ's.) As carefully reasoned as some of these suggestions are, they all share the same shortcoming: They fail to appreciate the size and power of tropical cyclones. For example, when Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, the eye and eyewall devastated a swath 20 miles wide. The heat energy released around the eye was 5,000 times the combined heat and electrical power generation of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant over which the eye passed. The kinetic energy of the wind at any instant was equivalent to that released by a nuclear warhead. Perhaps if the time comes when men and women can travel at nearly the speed of light to the stars, we will then have enough energy for brute-force intervention in hurricane dynamics.
Human beings are used to dealing with chemically complex biological systems or artificial mechanical systems that embody a small amount (by geophysical standards) of high-grade energy. Because hurricanes are chemically simple --air and water vapor -- introduction of catalysts is unpromising. The energy involved in atmospheric dynamics is primarily low-grade heat energy, but the amount of it is immense in terms of human experience.
Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn't promising either. About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it's still a lot of power, so that the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world's lights many times a year.
Perhaps some day, somebody will come up with a way to weaken hurricanes artificially. It is a beguiling notion. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do it ?
Perhaps the best solution is not to try to alter or destroy the tropical cyclones, but just learn to co-exist better with them. Since we know that coastal regions are vulnerable to the storms, building codes that can have houses stand up to the force of the tropical cyclones need to be enforced. The people that choose to live in these locations should be willing to shoulder a fair portion of the costs in terms of property insurance - not exorbitant rates, but ones which truly reflect the risk of living in a vulnerable region. In addition, efforts to educate the public on effective preparedness needs to continue. Helping poorer nations in their mitigation efforts can also result in saving countless lives. Finally, we need to continue in our efforts to better understand and observe hurricanes in order to more accurately predict their development, intensification and track.
Agreed. That's the first thing I thought when I read the headline. It's sort of like how we don't like the icky nasty river overflowing and messing up our farms that we decided to make right next to the river because the best soil is there due to the ovious fact that the river overflows and deposits nice rich silt there. So we build Dams (Aswan on the nile) or levees (lower Misissippi) and everything is hunky dory until the river delta starts to go away. In the case of New Orleans it caused the city ro sink, the delta to disappear and ultimately removed its only defense (I just read a interesting piece from 2002 about what's going to happen in a few years if it doesn't get fixed - surprise it happened just like they predicted). Anyway, rather than messing up the normal cycle why not get out of nature's way and let it do its thing. That means dealing with the normal flooding , fires, hurricanes, tornados and other disasters. This stuff isn't new folks! Hurricanes aren't a new development that suddenly appeared because of global warming or sunspots or migrating birds. It's a natural process and a way for the atmosphere to expend energy. Oddly enough it reminds me of parents who want their precious little darling to have everything they didn't have when growing up so the kid never learns anything. "do not deny your children the experiences that made you who you are" - spoken by a very wise person.
We don't even understand global warning 100% yet, now we want to do this?
.don't build a city below water level. . .
Oh, I don't know. I think I understand it pretty well. The sun does it. To prevent hurricanes just put out the sun. This may raise some side issues, but I'm sure that sometime in the future technology will be able to deal with those.
. .
On the delta of one of the world's great flooding rivers in the hurricane belt. It's the confluence of the three factors that really causeses the trouble. We're not likely to see similar events in the Netherlands or Death Valley.
I wrote a post about the similar problems faced by Bangledesh a few years ago. Since the problems faced by that country are largely geographical in origin the world can send them aid year after year for all eternity and nothing will ever change. Of course there the problem is also political. In the old days, when the country was simply a region of India, the peasanst would come down from the hills in the spring, plant their rice, go back up hill when flood season started, and come back to harvest the rice when the floods had receded. Now they've placed an international frontier right where the high ground starts.
The Big Easy doesn't have that problem. It exists where it exists for perfectly legitimate reasons and will be rebuilt because it has to be, but most of the people in the area aren't there for that reason and the people who are should go uphill when the prevailing conditions make such a wise move.
Doctor, it hurts my city when the volcano blows up. . .
There is a simpler, easier, and more cost effective way of dealing with the above than putting out the volcano.
KFG
Hurricanes don't work like this; once over land they immediately lose power. A hurricane's power is derived from the warm water over which it forms; once any part of the storm passes over land, it necessarily weakens. Once the entire storm is over land, it begins to fall apart rapidly, even when it makes landfall as an extremely well-defined "hard eyewall" storm like Katrina.
Katrina was a 140 m.p.h. Category 4 storm at landfall; 18 hours later, it was a tropical storm with sub-74 mp.h. winds. The next day, a loose collection of thunderstorms with little residual cyclonic movement.
Oh please. And when 1000+ Iraqis dies in a stampede, was God warning them? What about at Mecca when thousands used to die in the pilgrimage every year? Was he warning them too? Or when the monsoon is particularly bad and hits Indonesia, drowning 10s of thousands? Or when a tsunami kills hundreds of thousands in south asia?
Natural disasters hit areas. Sometimes they hit without warning and everybody dies. Sometimes we have warning and the poorest and dumbest tend to die, like happened in New Orleans. Such is life, and the US isn't immune though it is generally more well-prepared and equipped to handle them than other nations.
Phil Shapiro seems to know very little about submarines, or boats in general.
First of all, nuclear submarines are a lot faster than what he says (25 mph, less than 20 knots). Even in 1995 when he wrote the FA.
But most of all, he imagines that a 0.5 mile wide "plow" would only slow them down by 40% -- from 25 mph to 15 mph. My guess (based on experience from commercial fishing on not from submarines) is that a 0.5 mile wide plow would slow the sub down to 0 mph (or 0 knots, for that matter).
If the rest of his ideas are as sound as that one, well...
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
As to the relationship between global warming and hurricanes, there is none. Hurricane frequency occurs on a natural cycle of warmer SSTs (sea surface temperatures) in the Atlantic. This is a real phenomena that is not understood but does occur. When SSTs rise by 1 degree C on average in the above the equator in the eastern Atlantic, you get more hurricanes. Plain and simple. This rise in temperate occurs on roughly 20-30 year cycles. This is nothing new. The problem is, coastal building in the US occured during a natural "low" in hurricane activity. The intensity picked up in the 1990s and we're right in the middle of that "high" intensity phase now. When SSTs in the Atlantic cool (sometime in the next decade and head south of the equator), hurricane frequency will fall. We are talking thousands of square miles of ocean here that feed these storms. You think an iceberg and a couple of subs trolling the waters is going to affect that?
Articles like this are so comedic. Despite being a race that has created nuclear weapons, we have nothing on Nature when it comes to brute energy expenditure. "Stupidity" does not even begin to describe the simplistic and child-like thinking that produced this article. Only human arrogance in thinking that we can solve or alter anything to suit our desires can produce tripe such as this article.
Money and time is best spent on prediction, warning, disaster planning and recovery and further research into hurricane genesis so we can better understand how these storms come to be and how we can live with them better. And even then, it is an inexact science. People are better served by showing some awe and humility towards nature as history has shown, whenever Man tries to mess with Nature, Nature wins.
Or if the Governor of Louisiana had specifically asked the federal government for certain kinds of assistance...
She said "We need your help, we need everything." but she did not specifically request federal military support. Her press secretary said that she believed that such a specific request was not necessary.
I'm pretty sure that there are rules which regulate the deployment of federal troops within state borders. I think that it is indeed something that must be formally and specifically requested.
CNN.com has free video now, but it's free video that you can't link to (hardly "free" if you ask me). Go to CNN's homepage and watch the clip "Miscommunication Delayed Response" to hear the governor say to her press secretary in what looks like a rehearsal or perhaps a moment that the governor believed the cameras were not yet recording. She said on Wednesday (to her press secretary in a whisper while being recorded): "I really need to call for the military, I should have started that in the first call." These are pretty damning words to be said on tape.
Katrina was indeed predicted, and one of the bureaucrats said "We need your help, we need everything you've got." which meant to her "send planes, trains, buses, boats, food, water, shelters, etc" but she did not communicate such requests specifically.
And let's not forget the fact that Louisiana's National Guard are mostly deployed over in Iraq. They were not even in place or ready to help the state cope with the disaster, because the Federal government thinks they can be put to better use overseas. Let's also not forget that since 2003, the levy budget has been but a pittance due to lack of contribution by the federal government because of, specifically, needing to fund the Iraq war.
One more thing we can't forget is that a man can make a phone call and order thousands of people to be killed instantly by napalm, but that same man cannot make a phone call and order thousands of water bottles dropped on a city ravaged by a hurricane? Think about this one real carefully: We can more quickly and capably kill our purported enemies than we can help our own citizens. Is that the kind of nation you want to be a part of?
We do not need to control hurricanes, we need to control our government.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Despite your depressing analysis, things are not getting worse. At least not in the sense you think they are. The only reason the damage is worse is because the population along the coast is getting larger. We're not seeing more storms and more powerful storms and they are not part of some "Earth is dying" or "Global Warming" scenerio. When Andrew hit, for instance, it was in a relatively low year of only about 7 storms. This is all normal and a normal part of nature. Whether we should "do" anything is a matter of ethics and science but not a matter of "things are getting worse."
Take a look at the actual NOAA data, and you find that for the past several decades we have been in a *lull* of hurricane activity, and that's just recently started to swing back the other way.
The NYT has this to say:
Only on
As for controling hurricanes... HORRIBLE idea. First off, you would likely kill the everglades (which depend on periods of intense wind and soaking, tropical rains). Also, the overall impact to global climate would be almost impossible to predict. We have, for example, no idea if the storms of the Atlantic and Pacific are the mechanism that ended the last ice age. If they are (small, but reasonable chance), then disipating storm energy could directy lead to shortening the time to the next ice age. Think global warming is bad? It's a hiccup in temperature change compared to a real ice age!
My rule of thumb is: don't mess with large systems that you depend on for your survival.
It's not about the entire storm, it's primarily about the eyewall/center of circulation, and there is plenty of water leading to DC (the Chesapeake Bay) or New York (Long Island Sound) that would allow a strong hurricane to maintain a large portion of its strength.
That said, the water temperatures during much of the hurricane season (very late summer/early autumn) around those cities is in the mid-70s (F, of course), whereas the temperature in the regions where hurricanes form and strengthen, including that of the Gulf, are in the mid to high 80s and above.
Hurricanes do make it to cities like that-- if I remember correctly, Hurricane Hazel brought 100 mph winds to Philadelphia and caused a substantial bit of distruction there in 1954. The same year, Carol incited sustained winds of between 80-100mph across most of Connecticut after landing in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, these are much less common events than in those areas where the water is warmer, especially the Gulf Coast.
Just so we're clear on this: I've done graduate level work in Atmospheric Science. Actually, just for fun I'm working on my PhD right now and I've worked as a research contractor for a bunch of years. And in my time I've picked up a few useful nuggets of information.
A couple of relevant tidbits to the topic at hand:
1. Hurricanes are big. Really big.
2. Humans are little. Really little compared to hurricanes.
3. So are ships, planes, icebergs and nuclear weapon detonations.
The question is not whether we can change hurricanes but rather whether we can do anything at all that a hurricane could even notice. I think there's a story about some crazy king-guy ordering the tide to stay out (and getting rather wet), but I'm sure that's not relevant to the topic at hand.
nb: There is of course a side issue, specifically whether anyone other than the most flagrantly stupid people would screw around with the dominant mechanism by which excess energy is re-distributed throughout the atmosphere and what incidentally may be a major source of fresh water to the US south east. But nevermind.
It would be interesting if it were true... Two of those THREE are NOT american: Forbes list of largest companies (sorted by profits):
ExxonMobil (U.S.)
Royal Dutch/Shell Group (Netherlands/United Kingdom)
BP (United Kingdom)
Chevron Texaco ranks 7th (ie: not in the top 6), and is a U.S. company.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
How about forest fires?
We've begun to learn that forest fires are a natural part of the forest lifecycle, and that by suppressing the normal small fires, we've really messed things up royally.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
since i relocated from los angeles to homestead, florida the site which was ground zero for hurricane andrew in 1992.
firstly, without hurricanes this place will rot. sediment builds up, pesticides, fertilizers from agricultural runoff, etc. or just waste. hurricanes are a cleaning process and an evolutionary pressure on this area. invasive species are killed off in hurricanes easily while nonnative plants thrive. the stir up of sediment in the ocean which hurricanes then dispurse to the sea allows the coral to grow closer to the shore which is currently being pushed out farther and farther due to pollution. at least florida needs hurricanes or youll watch the everglades die.
secondly, hurricane damage on this scale only happens once. it happened here in 1992 with andrew. it was a whole bunch of trailer parks before that. i have talked with coworkers quietly in miami who say it was the best thing to happen because it was such a dump and now everything is brand shining new. i live in one of those new complexes. when katrina came by us as a strong category 1 our complex had almost no damage at all but surrounding cities were flooded. see my pictures at http://www.cixel.com/photos/katrina/
wood construction down here is illegal now. if the gulf coast rebuilds with concrete block (and concrete roofs) they will never have a problem again. you could throw a category 5 at our complex and it wouldnt flinch. also all the vegetation is nonnative so as much as it will get beaten and thrashed about it will recover and also not create alot of flying projectiles. new orleans is another matter, the area below sea level they should abandon.
What im saying is though. this scale of damage only occurs once. with modern building techniques this sort of thing is a problem of the past.
how often do you hear puerto rico whining about hurricanes and they get hit by them all the time?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Senate Bill S. 517, introduced by Senator Kay Hutchinson (R-TX), on March 3, 2005 is pretty interesting:
S. 517: A Bill to Establish a Weather Modifications Operations and Research Board, and for other purposes.
Huh? Can this be for real? You bet: Clicky.
Also interesting, this is supposed to take effect on October 1, 2005! It has only been introduced, so this is unlikely at this point. But still the timing is creepy.
Thanks to Richard C Hoagland's Enterprise Mission web site for the information. Richard is way out there sometimes, but he definately has great credentials.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
Why does God have to be nice?
This is my sig.
Exactly what you'd expect, considering that the US makes about a quarter of the world's stuff. Measure pollution versus output, and I think you'll find that the US is quite a bit more efficient than many countries.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Except that hurricanes spread the heat from the equatorial regoins toward the polar regoins. Thus providing much more livable contions across much of the planet. While hurricanes can be bad, they are localized problems. Removing/controlling/reducing them would be a globalized problem.
If people are willing to live where these localized problems occur, they need to accept the consequences and not scream that they're having these problems. Hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, drought, heat and cold are all known problems. Either deal with them or move. But don't try to affect the rest of the planet just to solve your shortsightedness.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
But now, try to express the power of a race car engine expressed as butterfly-wing flaps/second!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
...alter the path of a hurricane by sacrificing a goat..."
in
dis
tinguishable.
One massive problem with this idea is that weather is still predominantly random from a day-to-day human standpoint.
--
Yeah!!! We deflected Hurricane Vader away from Miami and straight through the heart of downtown Jacksonville!
No you didn't, it was heading to Jacksonville anyway!
Yes we did, remember it started to curve south? We reversed that.
Did not.
Did huh.
--
Until we reduce the chaos in weather prediction enough to know precisely when and where a hurricane will begin--as opposed to "strong liklihood of a possible hurricane in the next few days over in this general area here" or "I'll bet it's hot in Arizona by July"--we'll have no way to know if we changed the hurricane's path sixty miles or six inches.
Of course, if we could get a hurrican through central Minnesota, I suppose that'd be a fair supporting argument for "well, I think it worked."
Mom says my
By the way, I suppose I can't blame people on /. for getting this wrong, since almost every major media outlet did: Not a single levee broke. All 4 breaks were in canal walls.
Levees are massive earthworks - they aren't easily "breached" but would have to be worn away (long time) or overrun.
The breaks were in the canal flood walls.
Maybe we should build more sturdy canal flood walls, but maybe it should be done by people who know what they hell they are talking about, not people who don't even know what actually broke. A lot of journalists seem to think they are experts on everything under the sun. Every time I read an article or watch a report on something in which I'm even a rank amateur I notice MAJOR inaccuracies/simplifications/lies.
Don't count on news-people to even get right reporting what the problem is, let alone the solution.
[PS. Yes - this isn't a solution either - perhaps we should talk to people in Florida, who say that after they got hit by Andrew finally learned how to evacuate properly. Get that fixed, then talk about trying to defeat hurricanes by building bigger walls...]
Lose essential liberties to get temporary safety = get only hassles and security theater.
It is this process that functions as the global heat pump/exchange. Hurricanes seem to function a little like a release valve when the Ocean currents can't transport enough energy up north, they convert the heat into kinetic energy (big waves, big winds, evaporation of water).
Tamporing with the hurricanes would stop the release valve which would have very unpredictable consequences for the global heat exchange. It's a bad idea. Next thing you know we'll end up with a Global Superstorm like in the movie The Day After Tomorrow. No thanks.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
I say we skip trying to find the individual butterfly responsible and eradicate the entire lot of them.
They are an Order of hate.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.