Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html

by rglovejoy • 17 years ago

31 39 17 years ago

aoml.noaa.gov

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Some people should definitely not take up hacking.

anulman• 17 years ago

I ran almost this exact topic as what's called a "style case" at a university debating tournament a year or two ago. It was one of my favourite things of life.

(A "style case" is one where the facts or logical reasoning behind an argument are secondary to how funny and entertaining your arguments and persuasive efforts are.)

According to what we concluded in that round, we need to start destroying tropical cyclones, and any other of Mother Nature's "attacks" on us, in order to better condition her and bend her to our will. It's Psychology 101, folks.

Apparently the NOAA disagrees. If this were the McCarthy era, I'd call them communists and be done with it.

CamperBob• 17 years ago

I saw a great 'style case' on another forum the other day. Someone was pointing out that mercury in fluorescent bulbs was even more hazardous than radioactive waste in a sense, because at least the radioactive waste would eventually decay into something harmless. The counterpoint was, "Well, they should just use mercury-194, which decays with a half-life of only 400 years, and turns into gold, to boot."

frossie• 17 years ago

Am I the only person disturbed that this is an actual FAQ that crops up "every hurricane season"

azanar5• 17 years ago

I am disturbed by the larger philosophy it represents; that things will be much, much better if we can just stop all of the destructive forces of nature from occurring. If we can prevent tropical cyclones, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the like, then everything will be ok.

What such a philosophy fails to take into account is that these forces aren't just destructive. They represent a system that has a certain equilibrium which is maintained by periodically removing excess energy that has been introduced. Sometimes this surplus of energy is quite considerable, and so the transfer of that energy results in damage to things along the path.

It is possible that going the other direction might work for some things; force the energy transfer to occur more often but less severely. However, even this might have unintended consequences. Less powerful tropical cyclones may not survive to areas as far inland that may depend on their seasonal arrival for necessary rainfall.

I think the best thing we could do is educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control, and that our reaction should not be panic and sensationalism but cautious respect and preparation.

lsb• 17 years ago

But modern life can't tolerate such deep and profound respect for the planet that cyclone-acceptance requires.

People forget that Manhattan island was once under a glacier, a couple thousand years ago. When people talk about "preventing and reversing climate change", they're not talking about putting Manhattan back under a glacier.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

> educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control

It's hard for me to express how much I disagree with this statement.

radu_floricica2• 17 years ago

To be honest, I am disturbed by the philosophy in your post. That stopping a natural cataclysm has side-effects isn't really something to be surprised of. If you don't take it into consideration then you just made a mistake (and a stupid one at that).

But to turn that into a system of thought and to consider non-intervention to be the default - I don't see the logic in that.

> I think the best thing we could do is educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control

Excuse me for wanting a cure for cancer. Yes, using a nuclear weapon is not the brightest idea in the book, but this doesn't mean the problem is unapproachable. A couple of directions that might be usable in the medium future:

- lowering the content of water in atmosphere in an area is something we can already do. Microparticles that facilitate rain are a pretty scalable method. This could be used to steer proto-hurricanes away from shore.

- large amounts of high-entropy energy are freely available in space.

But what I want to know is what good do you thing would do to "educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control"?

jballanc3• 17 years ago

It's representative of the average person's inability to judge scale at the extremes. As a random person on the street which is bigger and by how much: an atom or a transistor in their iPod? It's the same with the very large/powerful. The average person thinks, "A nuclear bomb is big and a hurricane is big, ipso facto." It's hard to comprehend just how much more powerful a hurricane is than a nuke!

iron_ball• 17 years ago

Wait, I can understand if people don't get it right even to within a few orders of magnitude -- I know I couldn't -- but don't people know that an atom is a gatrillion times smaller than anything visible with the naked eye? High school science can't be THAT bad.

mechanical_fish2• 17 years ago

Don't worry too much. The belief that nuclear energy will turn us into masters of the universe is an index fossil of the 1950s. This FAQ won't outlive the baby boomers who came up with it, all of whom were presumably raised on too many My Friend the Atom filmstrips and not enough Mad magazines.

When I was a kid I had a sort of Popular Science-y book from the early sixties that talked excitedly about the plans to dig the second Panama Canal by using underground nuclear blasts. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that this was a hilarious anachronism.

bkrausz• 17 years ago

Dammit...there goes my startup for weather alteration. My board of directors is going to be pissed...especially Mr. Jong-il.

leed25d• 17 years ago

Now we know what Bill Gates is up to.

azanar5• 17 years ago

This NOAA FAQ covers the infeasibility of doing this, but even if it were possible, via nuclear detonation or otherwise, there is still the conversation of whether it is wise to do so even if we could. What lasting effects this might have upon the climate?

As I've understood, the hurricanes that form every year are actually part of a process of advecting heat energy from the surface tropical regions to the higher altitudes and higher latitudes. I remember seeing a ocean temperature analysis just before and after Hurricane Rita traveled across the Gulf of Mexico, and the drop in ocean temperature was quite noticeable. Similar drops, to a lesser degree, can be observed with all tropical storms.

This process is really important to keeping temperatures around the planet more balanced that they would be otherwise. It also keeps the temperature of tropical oceans somewhat in check, so they don't spawn even more energetic cyclones later on. If we start trying to control this, there is the risk that we will screw ourselves by making tropical storms less frequent but much more severe.

cema3• 17 years ago

<sarcasm>Or better yet, why don't we try to destroy our nuclear arsenal by dropping it in cyclones? Two birds, one stone.</sarcasm>

Now let's see. First, there is a question of what effect it would have. How powerful should a nuke be in order to actually destroy a medium sized hurricane, and how will it affect the atmosphere and biosphere and the earth surface near the epicenter? Second, what should we do with the nuclear fallout? I am sure there are more questions to ask.

jballanc3• 17 years ago

I don't think all the nuclear weapons on the earth, detonated simultaneously, would have any affect at all on even the smallest of hurricanes. I once had the students in my intro chemistry course do some rough thermodynamics calculations on the topic. Essentially, if you assume that all of the thermal energy of the nuclear detonation is converted into expansion work and that this work is exerted specifically on the eye, what you come up with is that a single Hiroshima sized bomb would cause the radius of the eye of a strong hurricane to expand by around 30 cm.

The real problem, though, is that this represents an extreme upper limit on the effect that the nuclear weapon would have. Since most of a nuclear weapon's energy is in the initial impulse, most of it will pass through the hurricane with no effect whatsoever.

cema3• 17 years ago

Perhaps we should target not the eye but the periphery? The point would be not so much to destroy as deflect the hurricane while also fragmenting it. Instead of dropping one in the eye, blow up several nukes around it.

Another point to consider is we can try to use a nuclear explosion in order to prevent a hurricane from forming if we catch it early enough. Is that possible?

I do doubt that we can routinely nuke hurricanes (even ignoring the radiation effects), but looking at just the mechanical effects, I think it would be interesting to take another look at the picture. I am not sure that the effects of turbulence can be calculated, but how much can we get from the first principles?

BTW, Hiroshima was about 15 kt, if I am not mistaken, and the average modern nuke is on the order of 400 kt.

seldo• 17 years ago

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

phugoid• 17 years ago

Their "scientific" explanation is nonsense. Their compare the "energy" of the hurricane system with that of a detonation. Then they say you could change the Category of a hurricane by just increasing the ambient pressure.

Angular momentum is conserved. If you create a detonation in the middle of a spinning storm, you'll get the usual explosion effect (fast) overlaid on the spinning storm (relatively slow). That's even more nasty than either effect on its own.

hopeless• 17 years ago

People who ask that question should be disqualified from breeding.

azzleandre• 17 years ago

Reading the article raises an old question: When will we be able to retrieve the power from a hurricane? Let the thunderstorm occur and using the [YET-TO-INVENT]-technique, to power our civilization for... let's say a year.

mechanical_fish2• 17 years ago

The problem, as always, is energy storage. It's the real bottleneck. Batteries don't have a high energy density, they wear out quickly, they're heavy, and they cost a lot of energy and material to build.

If we could package up the energy coming out of some hurricane-powered turbines, store it up for a year, and ship it around the country cheaply... yeah, our energy worries would be a lot fewer. Especially if the same technology could be applied to solar grids in Arizona.

The problem with a hurricane, of course, is that you get a lot of energy but you get it all at once. You can store a lot of energy in a tree, but you can't turn a tree's worth of energy into a tree in five minutes. You'd rather that the energy trickle in over time, so that you have time to capture it.

dflock• 17 years ago

Does anyone know - or know how to figure out - how much power is 'stored' at any given time in the globe's power transmission lines? Intuitively, this must be a pretty huge amount - basically 1x the global power consumption at any given instant? Anyone know if there's any/much spare capacity, that could actually be used as a massive distributed battery?

narag• 17 years ago

If cyclons produce so much energy, the question should be how do we capture it, not how to destroy them.

DrJokepu• 17 years ago

Needless to say that hurricans, of course, ultimately get their energy from sunlight. As you can see, solar power is tremendous and got quite some potential, we should really concentrate on developing better means to more efficiently harvest the radiation of our stellar neighbour.

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

Better means would be nice, but aren't necessary: solar power satellites are well within current tech, and enough of them to power the entire US would have cost less than the Iraq War, assuming prize-funding rather than NASA.

rglovejoy• 17 years ago

See http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5f.html

holygoat• 17 years ago

I totally read "Cylons". The sentence was consequently awesome.

gaius• 17 years ago

Damn right we need to destroy the Cylons! Look what happened last time!

rjurney• 17 years ago

Why is it every two days someone is conspiring a new way to take my waves? In summertime, east coast surfers ONLY get to surf hurricanes. We love hurricanes. Its the only time we get overhead waves, glassy smooth water surface and offshore winds.

Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?

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