By Charlie Jane Anders
Hurricane
Sandy has caused untold billions of dollars in damage and insane casualties.
And we saw the “Frankenstorm” coming, for days in advance. We can send people
into space and put vehicles on Mars — why can’t we stop a hurricane in its
tracks, before it comes to our major population centers and
starts rolling for damage?
Here
are some methods that people have suggested for preventing, or stopping, a
hurricane — and why they might not work.
Method #1: Fly Supersonic Jets Into It
This
method has the benefit of being totally awesome: in a nutshell, you would fly
supersonic jet aircraft in concentric circles around the eye of the hurricane.
The jets would generate a sonic boom that would disrupt the upward flow of warm
air that creates the hurricane. University of Akron at Ohio professor Arkadii
Leonov and his colleagues applied for a patent for this method back in December
2008, as New Scientist reported.
In
their application,
Leonov’s team claimed that because sonic booms spread out as they travel away
from an aircraft, you might only need a small number of jets to stop a
hurricane. They wrote: “Two F-4 jet fighters flying at approximately Mach 1.5
are sufficient to suppress, mitigate and/or destroy a typical sized
hurricane/typhoon.”
I spoke
to Leonov on the phone. An excitable man with a thick accent that sounds a
bit like Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, he told me that he’s
published “220 different papers, in absolutely different fields of studies.”
And stopping hurricanes is just one of the many topics that he’s got opinions
about.
“I
cannot guarantee that it would work,” Leonov said about his plan, which he
began working on after HurricaneKatrina. The representatives of an Air Force
general asked him for computations that backed up his claims, but he was unable
to produce them because “the University is very weak computationally.” But he
thinks it could do the trick, because even though hurricanes are huge and
insanely powerful, “there is a specific, very sensitive area in the hurricane
structure” that is susceptible to cooling force.
Leonov
says “the professionals” in this area have “simply ignored me. I tried several
times to talk to MIT or Florida Hurricane Center. The answer was silence.” He
adds that he visited the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a few
months ago and presented his ideas. And they encouraged him to write a paper
for the journal Atmospheric Research, which he submitted recently.
So what
does NOAA think of Leonov’s idea? I asked Hugh Willoughby, a professor at
Florida International University and former director of NOAA’s
Hurricane Research Division. Willoughby responded:
I don’t
know if he met with NOAA, but this is a bad idea. Ask Arkadii to compare the
power of a couple F-14s with 10^13 Watts. Flying at Mach 1.5 in eyewall
convection and turbulence is a great way to destroy a couple of airplanes and
end the lives of their pilots. Moreover, the shock wave is like a very intense
sound wave that passes through meteorological motions without affecting them
much. The metaphor of shouting in the wind is apt. Sorry to be so negative, but
the people who propose these ideas generally don’t do the requisite Einsteinian
perspiration before they start marketing them.
Method #2: Use a Giant Funnel to Divert Warm Water into the
Ocean
Intellectual
Ventures is a company best known for owning a shit ton of patents and being
“the most hated company in tech,” according to CNET.
But back in 2009, Intellectual Ventures co-founder Nathan Myhrvold went on ABC
News and described his method of preventing hurricanes. In essence, you put a
plastic “inner tube” in the water, with a cylinder that uses wave motion to
divert the warm water that creates hurricanes down into the ocean floor. A few
thousand of those in theGulf of Mexico, and the hurricane’s strength would be
reduced:
Here’s
a blog post and
a white paper (PDF)
on Intellectual Ventures’ website, explaining the idea in greater detail.
I
contacted Intellectual Ventures to find out what’s happened with this idea
since 2009. I wasn’t able to speak to Myhrvold himself, but a spokesperson told
me:
We’ve
proven the viability of the Salter Sink through computer modeling and research
in our lab, but the project now requires more extensive testing that’s better
suited for a university or government research group. As you can imagine, there
would be significant regulatory hoops to jump through to legally field test or
deploy the technology.
Method #3: Project STORMFURY
This
was a government project to seed hurricanes with silver iodide, in the hopes of
strengthening the clouds around the hurricane and creating an “outer eyewall.”
According to Willoughby— who helped put the project to bed once and for all —
researchers seeded clouds in hurricanes Esther (1961), Beulah
(1963), Debbie (1969), and Ginger (1971) with silver iodide.
And at
first, the results appeared promising — the hurricanes seemed to slow down
somewhat. But further observation revealed that the hurricane changes were
consistent with what you’d expect a hurricane to do, and it turned out that hurricanes
develop an “outer eyewall” on their own, without any human intervention. And
observations in the 1980s proved that there just wasn’t enough supercooled
water inside hurricanes for the silver iodide to have much effect.
Method #4: Nuke ‘Em!!!
But why
screw around with plastic funnels and silver iodide crystals? Why not just
pretend hurricanes are the Gap Band and drop a bomb on them? Willoughby says
that people have proposed “blowing the hurricane apart with hydrogen bombs.”
Unfortunately, says Willoughby:
A key
difficulty with using even nuclear explosives to modify hurricanes is
the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can
release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than
10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release
is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.
According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a
rate of 1 x 10^13 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of
a hurricane.
A Grab Bag of Other Methods — Including Lasers!
Dozens
of other methods have been suggested. A 2007 CBC documentary called How
to Stop a Hurricane explores seven of them. There are three methods of
cooling the surface of the ocean: nitrogen blast, a chemical film, and deep
water pumps. There are also a few methods involving clouds, including
cloud-seeding and “carbon smoke.” More excitingly, an inventor named Ross
Hoffman received a $500,000
grant from NASA to explore the idea of beaming microwaves at hurricanes from
space to make them change direction.
Most
thrillingly of all, an inventor named Robert Dickerson suggested hitting
a hurricane with lasers from an airplane, during the early stages when
there’s still a lot of lightning. Here’s the relevant clip from the
documentary, showing how that would work:
Alas,
the experts at NOAA poured cold water on that idea, too.
So Why are Hurricanes So Hard to Destroy?
We’re
always hearing about how amazing our scientific achievements are, and we’re
used to thinking we’ve mastered our surroundings. So why can’t we just turn
hurricanes off?
I spoke
to Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute in
Oakland, CA, on the phone, and he stressed that we’re talking about “massive
geophysical events” here, whose size and complexity are even bigger than most
people realize. The biggest problem with attempting to tinker with the “massive
amount of energy swirling around” in a hurricane is that you can’t even tell if
you’ve had any effect.
I also
talked to Greg McFarquhar, a professor Atmospheric Sciences at the University
of Illinois, who pointed to one major stumbling block: “With our current state
of knowledge, we are still not able to accurately predict which tropical
disturbances will organize into more organized hurricanes, let alone
forecast precise paths or intensity a week in advance.” So there’s no way of
knowing which tropical storm will become a hurricane that threatens a major
population center, early enough to act.
Adds
McFarquhar: “There are simply so many interrelated factors that affect the
intensity of hurricanes, changing one parameter may have effects on other
factors controlling the hurricane through a series of non-linear
interactions.”
I also
emailed with Dale W. Jamieson, director of the Environmental Studies Program at
New York University, who was just about to hunker down in the path of Hurricane
Sandy. He told me that his main belief is that “people ought not to put
themselves in harm’s way,” and that the real answer is “to focus on living with
nature rather than trying to do gee whiz science to modify hurricanes.”
The Potential Unintended Consequences of Screwing With
Hurricanes
The
biggest worry about screwing with hurricanes is, you might create an effect
that’s worse than the problem you’re trying to solve. Just like with other huge
geo-engineering projects, “we just don’t want to mess around with complex
geophysical phenomena without knowing what we’re doing,” says Gleick.
Hurricanes
actually have some beneficial impacts as well as harmful ones, adds McFarquhar.
They supply moisture to parts of the world that would otherwise be bone dry.
They also transport heat away from the equator, towards the poles.
“Are we
wise enough to know the downstream consequences of large-scale modification?
I doubt that,” said Patrick Michaels, director of the Center for the
Study of Science at the Cato Institute. “There are obvious downsides to
fiddling with things that we don’t understand!”
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