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

misleading title anyone?

[naoursla]

Maybe they could have referenced the Eye of Sauron to make the title a little more misleading.

Re:misleading title anyone?

[R3d M3rcury]

My first thought was that we should be able to generate at least 1.21 gigawatts...

Re:misleading title anyone?

[flappinbooger]

I can see the headlines - "Florida destroyed, but scientists harvested enough free energy for decades" With the subtitle "Environmentalists don't know what to think"

We all know what powers a hurricane.

[Anonymous Coward]

The angry fist of God. Repent or you shall be smoten.

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.

Re:Nice find

[Aadain2001]

Do you think that once we identify the 'engine' driving a hurricane we could throw a metaphorical wrench in it before causes another Katrina? Also, should we even try? While preventing a hurricane from making landfall and destroying cities would be good for us humans, are the effects of hurricanes an important part of ecosystems/global weather patterns? Basically, can we stop them and if so, would it be a good idea to even try?

Re:Nice find

[TooMuchToDo]

My only fear is that a hurricane is the weather system's pressure release valve, and stopping hurricanes would cause more problems then the hurricane itself causes.

Re:Nice find

[ThosLives]

Also, don't forget the unintended side effects we'd have if these giant heat engines weren't around to transport all that surface thermal energy to the upper atmosphere where it radiates into space. The heat transfer from these storms is enormous, and I doubt that we'd want to see what the global warming models look like if we don't have hurricanes. Incidentally, I wonder if those models actually include hurricanes as a dissipation mechanism... Hurricanes are fairly large atmospheric features, but I'm betting they are still too small to show up on the scale of the models.

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?

I thought we already knew

[Kohath]

I thought we already knew that hurricanes happen because George Bush doesn't care about black people.

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).

Climate power

[gmuslera]

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.