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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
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.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it. For that reason, the disaster that was caused when the levees broke, was partly a human engineerd disaster, not a natural disaster. Of course, many government officials talk about it as a "natural disaster" to avoid them being blamed for it. To a large extend it politics played a large role than technology. In that case politics needs fixing!
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
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
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'?
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it.
It's worse than that. The levees were specifically only designed to be able to withstand a category 3 hurricane. In other words, the science/math/engineering all basically says that the levees would break in a category 4 hurricane - they were breaking as designed, they didn't just "break by chance" ... in fact there was no way the levees could really have held up to a category 4 hurricane, by design they were too weak to do so. If you have a truck that is designed to carry a maximum of, say, 3 tonnes, and you load it with 4, then it's not "random chance" when it breaks - you expect that it will break. The limitations of the levees have been known since they were built decades ago, and the dangers that they were going to break known. The problem is that nobody in power (this adminstration or previous ones) has been willing to make the funds available to upgrade the levees, on a 'gamble' that a major hurricane would not hit during their terms. The Bush adminstration gambled again, and lost (even worse drastically cutting funding for the levees).
The politicians have been playing Russian Roulette with New Orleans. In Russian Roulette, if you keep playing, you KNOW for a FACT you're going to get fscked, you just don't know when. This is 100% a human-engineered disaster. You can't tell me Taiwan can build the world's tallest building to hold up in an area that gets many earthquakes and typhoons, but the US doesn't know how to build a levee that can withstand a category 4 hurricane? It's not an "act of God" when the world's tallest building does or doesn't fall down in a 7.0 earthquake - it's an "act of Engineering" (and funding). Likewise for the levees.
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.
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.
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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.
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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