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Scientist Are Working to 'Steer' Hurricanes
E++99 writes "In the wake of Katrina, two teams of climate scientists have been working to steer hurricanes. Both teams are using the technique of removing power and speed from strategic points in the hurricane, effectively refracting its path. The American team is approaching this by warming the areas of the tops of the hurricane clouds, either by dropping ash to absorb heat from the sun, or directly beaming microwaves on those areas from space. The Israeli team is taking the approach of cooling the bottom of the hurricane by releasing dust along its base."
Really. It sounds dangerous. It's not best to mess with Mother Nature. Especially when it comes to climate and weather. IMHO, weather control such as steering hurricanes will create more problems than it solves. Do you know what the results would be? Do you know what the long-term effects of hurricane steering would be? No, no one does because it hasn't been done.
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CBC just did a program on this last night:
http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/hurricane.html/
The linked page includes a program excerpt.
Conclusion: none of the *nine* different methods considered will work on their own.
Used all at the same time, they might make a difference.
I hope they have good liability insurance.
I think the lawyers got this one right. There's no way any legal counsel would ever approve something like this. WEAKENING, perhaps, but not steering. I know I would sue if someone steered the next Katrina into my house.
This presents a huge ethical dilemma.
If you steer the hurricane away from the big city, but it still hits a small town 100 miles away, and kills 100 people, have you just murdered those 100 people? And at that rate, the ones who survived are going to be pretty pissed that the government shot a HURRICANE at them.
What if we screw up, and send a Category 5 Hurricane on a collision course with Havana or Mexico City? That would have disastrous consequences.
This sort of technology has terrifying military applications as well. Send a hurricane at *insert insular communist dictatorship here*, wait til it's passed, and then invade the nation while they're picking up the pieces.
I'm generally for the advancement of science, but in this case, we're coming a bit too close to "playing God" for our own good.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Be very afraid.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They are worried about getting sued by the small towns they direct the storms to in the effort to avoid large cities. But if the space-based approach can be done efficiently, and we methodically steer all tropical storms over a certain size, couldn't we theoretically get them all to end up harmlessly in the North Atlantic?
Also for a gratuitous Star Trek II reference, "we are dealing with something that could be perverted into a dreadful weapon."
Hugo Chavez, the Bush Administration will get you yet!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
So how much carbon black or soot does it take to warm a hurricane to the point it changes direction? I'm picturing a hurricane that is redirected using this method dropping gobs of black rain on my car, house, driveway, yard, etc. That'll be fun.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
Well, they can make their way up along the coast a fair amount. I recall my old place getting hit once or twice really hard in the past, to the point that we didn't have power for 1-2 days. And I was a lot further up the coast than DC.
I'd imagine controlling a viciously-strong storm up the coast could have some devastating consequences. Sure, it wouldn't hit the intended target at full force but if an enemy controlled enough of them during a bad hurricane season they'd wear down the area a little.
We're not exactly standing on the beach and yelling "You shall not pass!" It's more like we're throwing it's steering out of alignment. Small changes applied appropriatly should have drastic effects on course, landfall strength, etc. It's part of what makes weather so hard to predict. Of course, that also means to we need to prepare for unforseen consequences...
Demented But Determined.
I know that the whole point is to save lives and all, but we really shouldn't be doing this. As it is we have screwed up the planet a lot. I'm sure there is some natural benefit to hurricanes (not that I know what it is) and by trying to control them, we are screwing with the ecosystem even more than we already have. At some point we're going to figure out how to control it and some guy is going to wipe out all of Florida in one big swoop because something didn't go exactly as planned. Don't screw with nature. Karma bites.
Software Reviews>
Your link gives a good explanation: because instead of a hurricane, you get a radioactive hurricane. That doesn't sound like an improvement.
Sounds awfully like a scam to get government funding for research, actually.
;-)
A typical hurricane packs a punch worth an "ordinary" atomic bomb exploding every minute. It would take an insane amount of energy to add/remove to even make a statistically significant difference.
Mother nature is *really* powerful and not to be messed with!
Ah, now if they could figure out how to remove some energy and convert into electricity, now THAT would be useful... a season's worth of storms can solve whole world's energy problem
- mritunjai
NO! Don't say that!
*runs to grab Companion Cube and proceeds to bomb shelter to wait out the reign of Yet Another New Overlord.*
is to get a bunch of people on the shoreline and have them all blow really hard(Sorry, I couldn't think of a way to phrase the previous sentence that WASNT a double entendre.)
Monstar L
Seems like the link you provided has issues (I.E. bad rendering, video link bad, etc.) because of the forward slash after it. Just remove the slash, and your good :)
It has been two weeks since scientists first tried to take the offensive with hurricane Murphy, and it seems the worst is yet to come.
Murphy was threatening the east coast as a, then, category 4 storm when scientists unleashed an assault of new techniques intended to thwart a disaster by gently steering the hurricane to a less populated portion of the coast. It became immediately clear that the efforts worked. Too well, in fact!
Hurricane Murphy took a steep turn to the northeast into the Atlantic, preventing all but the slightest landfall and causing practically no loss of life. The unintended consequence of this was that Murphy was now back in warm waters building power once again, something scientists hadn't predicted due to their underestimation of their initial efforts to divert it.
After about two weeks, Murphy has since looped back around to its original course aiming straight for northern Florida and Georgia. But the push back into the ocean has left it with a much higher force, so far reaching the higher end of the category 5 range and begging scientists to create, for the first time, a new category 6 level.
It has been decided that nothing will be done to coerce the hurricane this time as it makes landfall. Even if scientists were once again ready to release a barrage of new-tech weather weapons, they are not sure that they wouldn't exacerbate the situation.
<disclaimer>I am not a meteorologist, nor do I have a decent understanding of how hurricanes work due to my living in catastrophe-proof West Texas.</disclaimer>
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
Listen, the hurricaine was only half the problem. The reason Katrina was a disaster was not because of direct hurricaine damage that this kind of thing may prevent. Moving the hurricaine to the east or west would not stop the water surge that caused the levees to break! This is not the direction we should be heading as a society.
Why not spend this money on infrastructure and first responders? Or people to check to make sure mandatory evac's are carried out? Or insurance reform? If you had a hurricane coming at your house, would you rather have trained people to help you, make sure you get away safely and securely, and that your material things are protected... or would you rather count on beams from space? Are you kidding?
In 1994 I met a guy that told me this story. He was out of a masters program in argicultural science and wanted to do someting about the chicken problem whereby you have to feed them antibiotics when they're in close quarters otherwise they get sick. He reasoned that it was filty air that was doing so built a coup that had two walls charged with -15kv to electrostatically clean the air. He said it worked; the ait was clean, the chickens never got sick and there was a 4" thick coating of white fluffy dust.
One day the coup was wiped out by one of the rare hurricanes up here. Specifically the one in the Fergus/Guelph corridor.
He didn't think much of it other than "dammit".
Not long after he got a visit by a bunch of government types (he never said who, but said he was scared from the moment they said "hello".
They explained to him the hurricane was tracking a straight line then took a 10 mile south diversion, wiped out his coup then went back to it's original course. They wanted to know what on earth he had in that coup.
He said "hey, if I could divert the course of a hurricane would I me messing around with chickens?" and they want away.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Pointing out something that might go wrong does not require wit, only a desire to obstruct or to appear wise. Even less is required to point out that something vague and unspecified might go wrong. Even less, to refuse to notice that something massively valuable is likely to go right.
Imagine the Slashdot posts on the "Man invents fire" story.
If you have the technology to steer the hurricane away from the big city, but are paralysed by tough ethical choices into inaction, and so allow the hurricane to hit the big city and kill 1,000 people, have you just murdered 1,000 people? Or just the 900 difference in body count? If failing to prevent a death is less ethically unsound than causing a death in the course of preventing ten other deaths, how MUCH less ethically unsound is it?
Causing death while endeavoring to save lives is not murder. It's something I expect most people would have a lot of trouble coming to terms with, of course, and shouldn't be done without due consideration, but if I were put into the unenviable position of choosing which people live and die, and had nothing else to base the decision on, I'd go with the fewest deaths possible even if those deaths wouldn't have happened if I did nothing. Then drink myself insensible. Possibly every day for the rest of my life, hurrah Winston Churchill.
Yes... never mind the fact that a lot of hurricanes that assault the Eastern coast of the Americas (and Caribbean islands) form off the west coast of Africa and then cross the Atlantic towards us.
I don't like to sit. Sitting is for people who like to sit.
You can steer hurricanes and tornadoes reliably and easily. You use a heavy lifter like an old B-52 and you approach the storm and drop mobile homes along the path you want the storm to travel. Anyone who has ever seen a TV story on these storms will understand the strong scientific basis for this method.
It is highly doubtful whether human meddling will have a discernible influence on the morphology of any given hurricane. Hurricanes are simply too big and the amount of energy involved is too large. Have you ever seen a kid kick dust into a dust devil? The sucker continues merrily on its path. Think of the scale of dust-devil-to-kid and then think of the scale of a bunch of puny airplanes spewing dust to a hurricane!
I am highly skeptical of any conclusions drawn from simulated data. As a cloud modeler running at very high resolutions (much higher than hurricane simulations since I am studying much smaller individual thunderstorms) I can tell you that even the most sophisticated cloud microphysics parameterizations are extremely crude. Clouds and rain are represented not by droplets, but mixing ratios, and gross assumptions are made about drop size distributions, transfer rates between species, etc. So, to say "we dropped some parameterized soot in the model and it made a difference" is not saying much.
Small perturbations in a highly unstable chaotic simulations such as a hurricane simulation will result in noticeable changes in the simulation days down the road. This is not a surprise. But even a small perturbation in a model would involve a huge amount of matter or energy in the real world, and whether these perturbations could be orchestrated to create a predictable change in course is very highly doubtful.
Another problem that plagues all forms of weather modifications is that you'll never know for sure if the modifications themselves caused a shift in storm evolution, or if an observed shift was something that would have happened anyway. Causality is the hardest thing to prove - even in a model where you know the state of your system to seven decimal points of precision.
I really hope federal money is not spent on this kind of research. Is there a limit to the hubris of mankind?
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
To be honest, every time there is a hurricane, I am more relieved if it is headed towards the Florida Keys instead some where else that doesn't usually get hit by one. People who grew up in the Keys know about hurricanes. Our houses are mostly steel reinforced concrete and built on stilts. The flood water has to be a story high before it can reach the living room of my parent's house. Keys residents will laugh at anything that's category 3 or less. We know how to stock up on food and when to evacuate because it's something we have to do every couple of years.
My point is that directing a hurricane else where will likely cause more damage and deaths because the places where hurricanes hit have developed "defenses" against them. This is not an useful idea if they're intending to do good. Plus a great deal of natural life actually depends on the occasional hurricane to replenish itself. Hurricanes are natural events in those areas and people and wildlife have adapted to them.
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Finally, something plausible!
Being lived in Kansas, I always wondered, while tornadoes brought so much destroy to the cities, and were easily detectable on a meteo radars, why not fire high explosive rockets to them at least in attempt to destroy or diminish that tornado?
Hurricanes, while destructive to the coastline where they make landfall are beneficial in the long run. Most hurricanes that come ashore in the Gulf of Mexico are beneficial to the Mid-Atlantic states. Because a few days after the hurricanes come ashore, the remnants of the storm move east and bring needed rain to the mountain regions of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The rainfall here helps the rivers and tributaries which move eastward towards the Chesapeake Bay.
When will man learn to leave nature alone? Don't want destruction from hurricanes? Don't build on the coastline.