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Hurricane's Eye Reveals a New Power Source
Taking a closer look at the seemingly calm center of a hurricane, NASA researchers have been able to determine a few clues about what powers a hurricane. "Using computer simulations and observations of 1998's Hurricane Bonnie in southern North Carolina, scientists were able to get a detailed view of pockets of swirling, warm humid air moving from the eye of the storm to the ring of strong thunderstorms in the eyewall that contributed to the intensification of the hurricane. The findings suggest that the flow of air parcels between the eye and eye wall — largely believed trivial in the past — is a key element in hurricane intensity and that there's more to consider than just the classic 'in-up-and-out' flow pattern. The classic pattern says as air parcels flow 'in' to the hurricane's circulation, they rise 'up,' form precipitating clouds and transport warm air to the upper atmosphere before moving 'out' into surrounding environmental air."
Maybe they could have referenced the Eye of Sauron to make the title a little more misleading.
The angry fist of God. Repent or you shall be smoten.
Nice find submitter. Unfortunately the article isn't in print yet, I'd like to look at what model they used (I presume it was WRF. We are able to simulate hurricanes at unprecedented resolution today, resolving convective features that just weren't there before in coarsers simulations. Coupling this numerical finding with observations makes a strong case.
This is big news, if it pans out, by the way. Certain aspects of hurricanes are still somewhat of a mystery. We are pretty good at tracking their path today but are still pretty bad at forecasting their intensity. This work will certainly help with understanding what determines the intensity. Very nifty stuff.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
Is there a way to break up these moisture exchanges that "fuel" the hurricane (the article used a rather poor analogy about 'raising octane')? Like we do with forest fires, can we do some creative cloud seeding to either reduce their intensity, or perhaps alter their paths away from densely populated areas?
John
I thought we already knew that hurricanes happen because George Bush doesn't care about black people.
Before we go interupting hurricanes, perhaps we should better understand why they form? Basically they exchange energy between the oceans and the atmosphere. If we "preempt" the formation of hurricanes, what consequences would that have to the earth?
These storms do form for a reason. And the amount of energy released by these storms is enormous.
As it is, weather management really hasn't been rigorously tested or proven. Because of the number of uncontrollable factors, it's hard to tell if the money spent doing that is making any real difference.
It's all pretty simple really
http://www.akasha.de/~aton/NUWeatherEngine.html
There are plenty of articles by "ex"-military and "ex"-intelligence officers and personal, which point to the odd hurricanes of the recent years, as being the result of covert weather modifications operations by the Military Industrial Complex, whereby the Pentagonal-shaped "eye of the vortex" is attributed to macro-scaling Tesla (longitudal wave) scalar technologies, and related advances in covert military science.
NASA was able to detect the hot air pockets in the center of a hurricane using a clever indirect method. They dispatched two solar-powered rovers with B&W cameras to the center of hurricane Bonnie.
Since the rovers carried no atmospheric equipment, they used the haze apparent in B&W stills to estimate the moisture density of the air, and obtained a temperature estimate using an IR camera.
Of course, the major aim of the Bonnie mission was to search for life within the hurricane, so the rovers were equipped with a rock abrasion tool (RAT), an alpha particle detector, an extremely accurate iron detector, and some magnets.
Read about the Hurricane Exploration Rover Mission
It's that "...largely believed trivial in the past..." part that got my attention. Here's a brand-new discovery about a single phenomenon that counters what was previously known. This is One. Weather. Phenomenon. And yet we're supposed to take seriously the idea that climate science is "settled." The mind boggles.
Go read about LTCM for a stark look at how well even the brightest minds have done at modeling complex systems.
Unfortunately, no. Hurricanes are way too big and generate way too much energy for us to have an effect.
This will answer all of your questions about trying to destroy hurricanes.
There was an article in Scientific American about a year or so ago that had a cover story about this. The authors posited that if we had accurate enough forecasts, we could modify the initial conditions (through some sort of perturbation) before the storm even started, and get it to, for instance, form over the open sea instead of over land.
But such forecasts are probably not possible for, say, 50 years at least, and that assumes we have much, much better observational data than we do today (and of course Moore's Law holds true, or something like it).
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
http://www.bannination.com/
They have actually been experimenting with this just about since Bernard Vonnegut discovered cloud seeding.
The people who designed the experiments only chose to do them under certain conditions, and since sometimes there are years when no hurricanes, or no appropriate hurricanes, it took them a long time to find the right hurricanes to experiment on. And so they did get some results, but hurricanes being what they are, they were never able to come to any conclusions about whether the cloud seeding had any real effects.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I understand that predicting hurricane strength and path is important for evacuations and hurricane preparations, but how about some research on disrupting hurricanes?
Hahahah. Man controlling the weather. That's priceless. There is no way humans could ever have any effect on such a large and complex system.
-10 NOT GROUP THINK
the sun is really hot.
Chuck Norris!
lol: You see no door there!
Isn't it more appropriate to talk about the energy that they result from?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I mean, come on. In 3012, Slashdot headlines are going to read something like, "Scientists Trap a Solar Flare Inside Small Tupperware Container", and someone's going to come along and go, "Oy, is that a good idea?"
But then, potential power sources always get consideration despite the consequences. Exhibit A: the internal combustion engine.
What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
~100 years of high CO2 output seems to work...
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
"...some creative cloud seeding..."
I suggest we just drop Texas or California on it and flatten it like a pancake...that'll teach those blowhards.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Hurricanes are not the only big power source around climate events. With the power of lightning you can get nothing less than 1.2 Gigawatts, just enough to power up a time machine built inside a DeLorean. And thunderstorms is far more frequent than hurricanes.
Ok, hear me out. If this is so important, then perhaps disrupting this motion could destroy a hurricane. An eye-wall is a much smaller target than the eye or the whole storm. Could a million pounds of propane in a fuel-air mix disrupt the air enough to destabilize the hurricane? At billions of dollars of damage per storm, it's time to start thinking offensively. Let's strike the storm abroad so that we don't have to face it at home.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
get it to, for instance, form over the open sea instead of over land.
Hurricanes do form over the open sea. The Atlantic hurricanes form off the coast of Africa and move toward North America, then when they hit the warmer water in the Gulf Coast or other areas in the Atlantic, they get much, much stronger. Hitting land is one of the things that weakens them. After a few hours on land, they're basically just big rain storms. I think you meant direct them to open sea and away from land.
because you touch yourself at night. pwned.
"...alter their paths away from densely populated areas?"
If you were to do this to a hurricane in, say, the middle of the Atlantic, perhaps this wouldn't be a bad idea - it could save Georgia and the Carolinas from a lot of damage. But what about hurricanes in the Gulf? As someone who grew up in the Florida panhandle, I can tell you right now that this would not be a very politically popular thing to do. I can see the scenario now:
"Well, the hurricane looked like it was heading to New Orleans (or Tampa, or whatever), so we went ahead and changed its route. Sorry people of Pensacola (or Brownsville, or Biloxi, or wherever) - you lost the vote, so it's your lives, homes, and jobs on the line now instead of theirs. But it's all for the greater good, so stay happy!"
That's even assuming it were possible. Of course, what would really be beautiful would be investment in infrastructure to limit the damage caused by these storms and improve evacuation routes combined with a gigantic beating with the common sense stick for those who choose to live along areas where hurricanes can hit but also choose to not prepare at all for the inevitable storm. Then again, the latter may be as much of a pipe dream as the former.
OK, then, could we seed hurricanes in the ocean where they can do less damage, if we can't stop them?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
We've known how to do this for a long time, no one has the balls. All we have to do is gas all the butterflies.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
"not if you have the right propane accesories!!"
The moist packets of air move from the eye-wall to the eye and supercharge the Hot Tower....
OK, I'm kind of getting that this may be the script for: "Confessions of the Pizza Boy."
Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. I'm sure if we started calling Hurricanes "the Pizza Boy" and perhaps talk about the heat exchange as a marriage between wind and moisture, well, we'd have the administration right on top of those Shenanigans.
"Well send our best man -- Jeff Gannon, and he'll jump right on that. We can't have unnatural marriages in this country."
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
~100 years of high SOLAR output seems to work...
Fixed that for you.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
All we have to do is have chuck norris roundhouse the hurricane!!!
As I learned from watching the Sci-Fi channel, the solution will invariably involve detonating a nuclear weapon.
Actually the Doc's Time Machine requires 1.21 Gigawatts. So your 1.2 Gigawatt lighting bolt falls short. A lot short
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Basically they exchange energy between the oceans and the atmosphere.
That's actually the oceans and (to a lesser extent) atmosphere to space. Hurricanes greatly increase the heat that is radiated into space.Moore's Law?
That the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 24 months?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Reduce, reuse, cycle
win/win ;)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Except, of course, that solar output hasn't been higher.
Why do I get the feeling that this won't put a dent in your delusion that you're more of an expert in this subject than the climatologists who actually study it for a living?
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
It has been well documented for quite some time that hurricanes behave exactly like Carnot engines; therefore, it is a logical step to harness some free energy from this nearly ideal system.
Thanks. In one of your linked article's FAQ answers, I found this very relevant quote from the NAS's conclusions from 1985:
A special committee of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that a more complete understanding of the physical processes taking place in hurricanes was needed before any additional modification experiments. But isn't the point of TFA pretty much that we now have exactly that: "a more complete understanding of the physical processes taking place in hurricanes"? So do we now know enough to try again?John
Is this idea viable? My guess is no, you only get hurricanes because thousands of square miles of surrounding atmosphere are rotating, and have angular momentum to carry in towards the centre. On the other hand I know nothing about atmospheric physics: my objection might be silly
As one of those researchers seeking that more complete understanding, I can tell you that we're finding out that things are a whole lot more complex than expected. We're just discovering the physical processes that force some of the vital parts of the hurricane vortex. Rainbands are still a topic of active research and things like concentric (secondary) eyewalls are just beginning to have the spotlights turned on them. (Interestingly, there was a lull in hurricane research from about 1985 to 1995 (coincident with the tail end of the quiet Atlantic period). The field has exploded in popularity in the last ten years, though, thanks to some terrific new data sources and technological advances (computing, instrumentation like radar, satellite).)
Truthfully, and this is my humble informed opinion... controllable weather modification is still several decades away, at best. And that sort of stuff will be individual thunderstorm modification. I don't think the technology to even produce a significant, predictable change to something as powerful as the hurricane vortex is here yet.
It's definitely interesting stuff to think about, though.
-Jellisky
All we have to do now is to wait for a Hurricane to be named Harmony. Theoretically, we should then be able to tap into the Eye of Harmony and be able to time travel and stuff. Or do thing work differently here than on Gallifrey?
Mr. T pitied this fool on 27 July 1992.
perhaps you do not watch many sci-fi movies but the solution to any disaster is to blow it the fuck up with nukes.
angry russians -- vapourised.
asteroids -- pulverized.
earth's core shutting down -- nothing rhymes here.
earthquakes -- well we all know how well explosions work for crustal lube.
so why not just apply this same logic to a hurricane? five or ten strategically placed 200 megaton nuclear warheads should be able to dismantle the eyewall. As for the fallout: the rest of the country probably won't miss a few hundred tacky trailer trash inhabitants of the south.
NOTICE: I'M BEING SARCASTIC. THIS IS A JOKE. If you do not like my sense of humour you can shove it because the grand irony is that I do live in a "tacky trailer park" and most would probably call me "southern trash" despite my slight-leftist libertarian political leaning. As for the science behind it... like i said, it's a joke (but I would like to know if that would actually work). good day.
Pagan? Geek? Check out #paganism on Freenode IRC
So if it is a pressure relief valve, why not focus on trying to create one instead of killing one? If we create on early enough it will not have the reserve energy to become a "mega cat5" or what ever and their for should not be near as damaging. To kill one would likely take more force than creating one as to create one you should be able to apply lower force for longer time, not an option on a moving one.