Reposted From Dr. Roy Spencers Blog
August 26th, 2019 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
There is a story going around that President Trump once suggested using nuclear weapons to weaken hurricanes before they hit land. While he has denied it, the idea has actually been batted around for years.
A less radioactive idea, called Project Stormfury, was carried out by the U.S. Government for about twenty years starting in the early 1960s. Aircraft seeded hurricane clouds with silver iodide in an attempt to strengthen the outer portions of the storm in hopes of weakening the intense storm core.
The project was a failure because it was learned that hurricanes already efficiently convert the available cloud water to precipitation anyway, throughout the storm. The hurricane doesn’t respond to seeding with silver iodide.
What Fuels a Hurricane?
I’ve found that there is a general lack of appreciation of just how much energy nature uses in weather systems. Hurricanes are, of course, an example of an accumulation of a lot of energy that is organized into a single weather system with dramatic effects.
That energy was accumulated over many sunny days and weeks as huge expanses of ocean soaked up tropical sunshine and warmed. The hurricane circulation then draws upon that pent-up energy. The tropical oceans nearly everywhere have the energy required to fuel a hurricane; what is usually missing is an atmospheric disturbance with low wind shear throughout the depth of the troposphere so that the heat produced by rain clouds isn’t just blown away rather than concentrated into a small geographic area.
How About Nuking that Hurricane?
Let’s use the example of the B83 nuclear weapon, which is considered “the most modern nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal“. The bomb has an energy yield of 1.2 megatons of TNT.
The average hurricane releases that much energy every 10 seconds.
So, the hurricane probably wouldn’t care that much about a brief nuclear kick in the shins. (The idea of spreading all of that radioactivity would not go over very well with the public, either.)
But let’s say we had hundreds or even thousands of megaton-class weapons that were cheap and did not produce dangerous radiation. What could be done to weaken a hurricane?
The most fundamental problem with trying to weaken a hurricane is that hurricanes are driven by heat release, and these bombs would just add more heat to the storm, potentially making it worse. As mentioned above, in a hurricane, water vapor condenses into clouds and rain, releasing latent heat, which warms the troposphere and causes intense low pressure at the surface, leading to strong surface winds.
I suspect the idea would be to release the bomb energy in portions of the storm that could — theoretically — disrupt the inner core (the eyewall) where most of the hurricane damage occurs. But adding large amounts of heat energy could result in unforeseen strengthening of the core hours later. Who knows? It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.
I wonder if 3800 BCE had the same Gulf circulation. It wouldn’t take much at those lower sea levels to disrupt the Gulf Stream that transports heat from the region and thus robs storms of energy. A hot bathtub of a Gulg could breed many more storms.
Regardless, I am listening to the lamestream media and apparently many people are not prepared because Dorian is so “early” in the hurricane season. I shake my head.
A D-hurricane in late August is already behind the curve.
What if extinction (of thought) rebellion members glued themselves to the beach, would that make any difference?
The sons of beaches could be used as flexible sand paper after the protest was over.
Everyone has forgotten about Project Stormfury an effort in which the US Navy’s (then) nuke bombers were employed in seeding hurricanes.
Didn’t work and should serve as a cautionary tale for those enamored with engineering the climate…
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477%281985%29066%3C0505%3APSASC%3E2.0.CO%3B2
https://www.theblackvault.com/documentarchive/project-stormfury/
Wasn’t HAARP supposed to do precisely that, control weather and turn it to an absolute weapon of mass destruction ?
And didn’t Tesla release, a strong enough to deface Siberia by unprecedented storms, death ray from his tower?
And now we are back to plain nukes and bombs ? There must be a conspiracy job going on to explain why that much of advanced weather control went missing.
/sarcasm:off, aspirine:on/
Palmface…
Stir it the other way. I’ve seen it done with a cup of tea many times. Just a bit of upscaling needed.
And ‘some assembly required’ as the package says…
Now we’re thinking.
I would suggest sparging air below the surface ahead of the hurrricant to bring cold water to the surface or to steer the storm away from land.
We don’t need to disrupt a hurricane. If we could just tweak its trajectory at points where our ever improving weather models say that the veering gradient is strongest we might sometimes be able to shunt a hurricane away from landfall or more populated areas.
SOMETHING of value has to come out of all these billions dumped into computer modeling, right? Start running tests on what placements of what kinds of bombs show the most nudging ability then figure out how steep a veering gradient it would take for such nudges to create a worthwhile effect, then figure out how likely a hurricane is to encounter that steep a gradient and whether our modeling can be made realistic enough to identify and take advantage of such occurrences.
Even feeding the intensity of a hurricane could be useful it that affects its trajectory.
Come on we are green these days the solution is obvious mobile renewable powered fans on renewable powered ships and we use them to blow the hurricane away from landfall 🙂
“Electromagnetic phenomena are present in almost all processes in the world. A striking example here is the electrical activity manifested within thunderstorms. The electrical activity also takes place during the passage of tornadoes.
There are other examples of hazardous atmospheric phenomena. The most impressive of which (in size) are hurricanes,
typhoons or tropical cyclones (TC). The present paper is
mainly devoted to study of these large-scale, vortex atmospheric phenomena, but not to them exclusively.”
https://www.nonlin-processes-geophys.net/20/293/2013/npg-20-293-2013.pdf
1-1 INTRODUCTION
“The natural world provides precious few clues to the ubiquity of electromagnetism. The properties
of rubbed amber and the magnetism of lodestone were little more than curiosities until the 17th
century. The elucidation of the nature of lightning and the recognition of light as electromagnetic
radiation were even more recent. Yet our world is governed by electromagnetic interactions. All
chemical bonds, the strength and weakness of materials, light, the influences that form and control
living things are all aspects of electromagnetism. Indeed, only three other types of fundamental
force are known: the weak force, the strong force and gravity.
Of these forces the first two, which are purely nuclear forces, are effective only over distances
of less than 10-12!m – that is smaller than an atom. They are associated with radioactivity, but
otherwise are of no consequence in chemistry and biology. Gravity is such a feeble force that it
matters only in interactions involving bodies of ‘astronomical’ mass and is negligible in interactions
between small things. Apart from the earth’s gravitational pull, every force that you experience is
electromagnetic in nature.
Electromagnetic force is associated with a fundamental property of matter – electric charge.
No process is known which creates or destroys even the minutest amount of charge. This is
formally stated as the law of charge conservation: electric charge can not be created or
destroyed.
The SI unit of electric charge is the coulomb, symbol C. The magnitude of the charge on a
single electron is a commonly used quantity in atomic physics. It is
e ≡ 1.6 ¥ 10-19 C.
Thus 1 C ≡ 6.2 ¥ 1018 e.
The charge on an electron is -e, and on a proton, +e.”
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/super/life_sciences/E/E-all.pdf
There will be a steady stream of such stories from unnamed sources that will effectively capitalize on Trump’s often irrational tweets and thus are believable. Trump’s own fault.
Which by the end the media will have lost the little credibility it has left. The press needs to remember the old saying “you live by the sword you die by the sword”.
to disrupt a hurricane you need to mix the surface water with cold water from 10-20m down to drop it’s temperature by a few degrees – which is what hurricane waves do. This takes a minisule amount of energy on the order of millionths of the heat transfer effected. Getting an armada of large ships to pull long wide mixing booms would probably have a quite measurable effect and might even be a cost effective solution to stop hurricanes. Failing that a 100’s of thousands of pv powered buoys pumping cold water to the surface might also do the job.
First, do not play around with Mother Nature. People do not realize how much energy there is in a thunderstorm. let alone a hurricane.
I always told my student pilots and navigators: Ever try spitting into the wind? You will achieve the same result with a nuclear bomb in a hurricane. End of story.
I agree. It is time to end attempts at climate engineering. nature handles situations better than we could. We do not know the mechanisms by which nature regulates things. Our attempts to influence things simply skew nature’s successful mechanisms.
Why not a “hurricane tax”? Have everyone pay and extra dollar a gallon at the pumps.
Send this to Washington to save us from hurricanes.
Did you know that there was a weather altering operation that went on in Laos until about 1970? I knew about it from a meteorologist who flew on the WC-130s involved. The objective was to make the rainy season along the Ho Chi Minh Trail wetter for longer. Don’t know how well it worked, but they did pick up ground fire from time to time
we obviously need some experiments to decide this.
can’t rely on the mere “evidence” of physics.
if you dont have empirical evidence… the only kind of evidence there is– about the effect of dropping a nuke
in a hurricane then you cant say anything.
fun argument huh?
The sub commanders are just dying to launch, what’s the worst that could happen ?
One way to reduce the impact of a hurricane would be to release a lot of nukes above the cloud layer – either to directly add heat or to create blocking dust (although you’d need to explode them into something that creates dust).
That would block the “cold sink” part of the hurricane and pretty quickly reduce the power. But i doubt the effect would be large enough to make it worthwhile.
Get all the forest fire planes that drop water on forest fires, fill them all with kitty litter and head for the eye of the storm AND DRY UP THAT SUCKER!!!
The bomb has an energy yield of 1.2 megatons of TNT.
The average hurricane releases that much energy every 10 seconds.
Any chance of someone working that out in Hiroshima’s? Just so the SkS kiddies can understand.
If Little Boy yielded 12 KT, then 1.2 MT would be 100 Hiroshimas.
Wow, 100 Hiroshimas every 10 seconds! That will cause their little Hiroshima do-wacky thingy to have a melt down.
Dorian spared Puerto Rico, I don’t think it is a coincident that it did so after the President threatened it with a Nuclear weapon.
Now after the Democrats have undermined the President’s idea, Dorian is setting its sights on Florida.
Mmm, connected maybe?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/08/rumblings-did-trump-set-up-white-house-leaker-madeleine-westerhout-with-ludicrous-nuke-the-hurricanes-nonsense/
Joe Bastardi just put out an article on Project Stormfury..
It made remember a proposal that had been made back in the early 2000’s where it was proposed to use a a group of large aircraft carrying super-absorbent polymer and dumping it into the eye of an approaching Hurricane..
What ever happened to that idea?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1101-storm-experts-make-cloud-vanish/
Umm..? I believe it is possible to protect a vulnerable coast from hurricanes – it just takes some serious infrastructure.
Specifically it takes a magninot line of windmills sitting on top of rather large (in the range of 0E6 cubic meters) air tanks. During normal times the windmills push compressed air into the tanks, when the eyewall envelopes the windmill, the tanks are vented. The expansion uses up the heat energy in the air, the presure imbalance ends briefly, and the energy needed to restart isn’t available so : poof, zap, bang: the hurricane just stops.
It seems absurd,but concrete’s cheap and as windmills get shut down on land we’re going to have a lot of them available cheap – and no generators needed, just air pumps. So,surprisingly enough, it might be do-able.
Putting this out there because everyone seems stuck on nukes.
What about dropping the temperature in the hurricane by releasing ship loads of liquid oxygen or a similar frigid substance into the air at sea level?
A small fleet of Liquefied Natural Gas carrying ships could enter the hurricane area when or before it becomes a Cat 1. Hit the hurricane before it grows in power.
Thoughts? Towing icebergs to cool down an area is absurd.
Why can’t they b blown up when they first begin to develop, usually small off the coast of Africa???? Why do we wait until they are cat 2,3 4???