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."

Comments

Nice find

[Orp]

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.

Predicting? How about controlling?

[plover]

I understand that predicting hurricane strength and path is important for evacuations and hurricane preparations, but how about some research on disrupting hurricanes?

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?

Re:Predicting? How about controlling?

[Orp]

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).