I am no genius, but hurricanes are fueled by warm water. Microwaving water makes it hot - adding fuel to the fire. Mebbe a giant freezing ray instead? Or what if they miss or Goldeneye hacks into the satellite and uses it to vaporize Los Angeles?!! Oh, that's OK then...

Comment one is correct. This might be how Rove is making these monsters. Using the heat of the water to microwave outerspace might work.

Imagine the side benefits, everyone could heat up some tasty Hotpockets at no additional cost.

Weird. I was wondering last night what would happen if one were to set of a really big nuke inside a huuricane.

Ok, stop looking at me like that.

Mike, I am not a genius either, but your point agrees with my understanding of how hurricanes work. On the other hand, there is the problem of specific heat. Before a giant space microwave beam even hits the surface of the water, it will lose some of its energy to the layers of the atmosphere that lie above the hurricane, including the cold, rapidly moving jetstream. Then there is the question of the sheer mass of the water in the ocean and the dissipation of the heat into its colder lower layers. Even if a significant heating effect somehow happens, storm surges crashing into shorelines are dangerous enough without being boiling-hot.

Microwave death rays from space have much better applications. I am thinking of the new hobby of large-scale decorating - possibly a giant smiley face carved into the pavement of Pyongyang's main square...

With all the tin foil Rove uses, one would think the price of aluminum would be higher.

C'mon, guys. A hurricane is a huge, rotating mass of evaporated water, and the cure is to evaporate the water? A hurricane is a huge heat engine, and the cure is to add heat?

Go see http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html

If the math bothers you, just skip to the conclusions.

Let's look at nukes. The biggest nuke ever was 50 megatons, exploded by the former Soviet Union. It was a BIG thing, not a nice little portable bomb.

A ton of TNT releases 4.184E9 joules of energy. If the hurricane releases 5.2E19 joules/day due to rain formation and 1.3E17 joules/day due to wind generation, then the hurricane releases the equivalent to 12.4E9 gigatons of TNT per day. That means the hurricane releases, every DAY, 249 times the energy of the biggest nuke ever exploded.

No, the nuke wouldn't make a dent in it. But, do you suppose seeding a hurricane with radiation would be a good thing?

I just compared hurricanes with nukes the other day. In my research, I discovered that a fully-developed hurricane releases the same energy of a 20-MT nuclear warhead every 20 minutes. I think we're decades, maybe centuries, from being able to manage that kind of power.

J.

One of the blue-sky theories I remember about hurricanes was in making them asymmetrical through heat or cooling. That can cause them to go into some "replenishing" modes, and decent timing could make them a category or so smaller at landfall.

TO: Stephen Green
RE: Re-Directed Energy

So...where would you 'redirect' them? Mexico? Cuba? Venzuela?

Would they not consider such an action an 'act of war'?

Regards,

Chuck(le)

P.S. Maybe we could get them to go as far as France?

Jay, using the figures of my previous comment, that's twenty six 20 megaton warhead equivalents per hour, or one every 2.3 minutes.

It's a heat engine. To kill it, you have to break it apart, or stop the heat flow, or remove the heat source.

There was an article on controlling hurricanes in last Oct Scientific American. An excerpt:

"IF IT IS TRUE, as our results suggest, that small changes in the temperature in and around a hurricane can shift its path in a predictable direction or slow its winds, the question becomes, How can such perturbations be achieved? No one, of course, can alter the temperature throughout something as large as a hurricane instantaneously. It might be possible, however, to heat the air around a hurricane and thus adjust the temperature over time.

Our team plans to conduct experiments in which we will calculate the precise pattern and strength of atmospheric heating needed to moderate hurricane intensity or alter its track. Undoubtedly, the energy required to do so would be huge, but an array of earth-orbiting solar power stations could eventually be used to supply sufficient energy. These power-generating satellites might use giant mirrors to focus sunlight on solar cells and then beam the collected energy down to microwave receivers on the ground. Current designs for space solar power stations would radiate microwaves at frequencies that pass through the atmosphere without heating it, so as to not waste energy. For weather control, however, tuning the microwave downlink to frequencies better absorbed by water vapor could heat different levels in the atmosphere as desired. Because raindrops strongly absorb microwaves, parts of the hurricane inside and beneath rain clouds would be shielded and so could not be heated in this way.

In our previous experiments, 4DVAR determined large temperature changes just where microwave heating could not work, so we ran an experiment in which we forced the temperature in the center of the hurricane to remain constant during our calculation of the optimal perturbations. The final results resembled those of the original, but to compensate for making no initial temperature changes in the storm center the remaining temperature changes had to be larger. Notably, temperature changes developed rapidly near the storm center during the simulation.

Another potential method to modify severe tropical storms would be to directly limit the availability of energy by coating the ocean surface with a thin film of a biodegradable oil that slows evaporation. Hurricanes might also be influenced by introducing gradual modifications days in advance of their approach and thousands of miles away from their eventual targets. By altering air pressure, these efforts might stimulate changes in the large-scale wind patterns at the jetstream level, which can have major effects on a hurricane's intensity and track. Further, it is possible that relatively minor alterations to our normal activities-such as directing aircraft flight plans to precisely position contrails and thus increase cloud cover or varying crop irrigation practices to enhance or decrease evaporation--might generate the appropriate starting alterations."

Essentially, the heating might be able to guide the hurricane, not so much stop it. Heat to the south and it will pull south it's track (oops, sorry Mexico). The idea of a bio-degradable oil-sheen to stop evaporation and weaken the cane might be better, but our tracking ability isn't good enough to make this feasible yet. Even putting aside of what the unintended consequences would be.

O God, first Jonah Goldberg laser lancing volcanoes now you microwaving hurricanes. What's next, Ace stopping an avalanche with a 'proton gun'? Boys, set your martinis to stun, relax and leave off the bad science fiction.

Do the math, the numbers just don't add up. Assume you had a magic "reduce hurricane strength" ray, ignore completely how it works, but consider how you'll need to power it. Logically, you'll need to apply an amount somewhat proportional to the power of the hurricane itself. And that power is enormous. Greater than the entire world electricity production. We're talking not merely gigawatts or terawatts, we're talking about units of power in the range of the detonation of a thermonuclear weapon, per second, tens to hundreds of kilotons (TNT equivalent) per second. The total energy used by a hurricane over its lifetime is tremendous, greater than the stored energy in all the nuclear arsenals on Earth. Lucky for us mortals on the ground, only a tiny, tiny fraction of that power is expended in destruction on the ground, and that spread out over a wide area.

Even with tremendous factors of efficiency (thousands, even millions) it's still going to take an unbelievable amount of power to disrupt a developed hurricane directly. And power isn't free, nor are magical anti-hurricane devices, which makes it seem a lot more sensible to invest in building more robustly and planning better.

Indeed, it might be easier to modify the terrain of West Africa and the surrounding ocean to remove the conditions that lead to hurricane formation.

Robin:

Oddly enough, altering the conditions at the surface is one of the more-probable scenarios.

You don't need to alter the conditions over the entire area of the whole storm. You just need to slightly disrupt them over a small area inside of the eye. A minor change in evaporation rates over a few square miles might do something useful to a storm. Coating the surface of the ocean with a very thin polymer or oil, maybe... still takes a large amount of whatever you use, but it's more manageable than most other ideas.

This is easy: Pave over the Gulf and the Caribbean! Yeah, that's the ticket!

dj, I think your numbers pretty much seal the deal on this idea. Pardon my pissiness, but maybe this blog could employ someone (dj?) to screen "science" posts.

By the way, didn't the maser as a source of "high-power microwaves" actually precede development of the laser by several years?

Ignoring my own advice to steer clear of areas of abject ignorance, isn't shear (large vertical wind velocity gradient) the natural dissruptor of these monsters? Anybody crunched the numbers for targeting hurricanes with the jet stream?

While I like the idea of introducing wind shear into the eye of a hurricane, there is only one source on the planet that is capable of such a feat. And I don't think that Senator Kennedy would readily volunteer for the job.

The scientific discussions were of a quite unexpected (to me) quality. Kudos to you for the erudition of your audience, and to your audience for their erudition. (Please excuse me if that sounded arrogant. Well, maybe it did.)

My cliff notes version:

Yeah. Add energy to a hurricane. Good plan.

If there were some way to use this energy to destabilize the hurricane in the sense of frying the butterfly that started it, (bad distortion of chaos theory) the idea may have some merit. However, let's not forget the energies involved. A hurricane packs the energy of one or more nuclear bombs. Thinking along the lines of the original proposal, the beamed energy would heve to be in the same range of magnitude as the storm. When we have devices that can beam that much energy towards the earth, we're going to be in beeeeeg trouble, the device will be much more dangerous than the hurricane, because WE will control it, not God or a random, capricious universe.

Beware of what you wish for.

PS. Robin, I just read your post. Whups. GMTA, huh?

I see nobody else has come up with the OBVIOUS solution, so I might as well say it:

Drop a big old iceberg down the eye!

J.

The major problem I see with the whole oil coating idea is that the waves inside a class 1 huricane are in excess of 20 feet with winds in excess of 74 MPH. This would surely disrupt any but the thickest oil coatings.

Then there is enormous amount of oil required to coat the ocean under a hurricane. Hurricane eyes are generally 20 or so miles in diameter which is over 314 square miles (quarter the size of RI). The whole hurricane size ranges from 100-500 miles wide but a typical size is about 300 miles across, or over 70,000 square miles (size of OK). I don't think Exxon or even Haliburton could dump enough oil, biodegradable or not, into the ocean.

Oh and how do you drive a ship fully laden (doesn't matter if its English or African) with oil into the teeth of a hurricane with the aforementioned 74MPH winds and 20 foot seas? And that is only a cat 1 hurricane, in Katrina and Rita type storms the waves would be in excess of 70 feet. There isn't a oil tanker that could last 10 minutes in conditions like that.

It's quite obvious that what is needed is a gigantic ice dispenser orbiting the earth. Geez, imagine the service calls on that baby....

Boys, set your martinis to stun, relax and leave off the bad science fiction. -Fred Z

My next car is going to have a laser that'll tell me when I'm too close to the car in front. And a gizmo that will check with satellites in orbit to find out where I am. As well as a rear-view mirror that automatically tints at night, headlights that turn themselves on when it gets dark. And probably some other stuff too- compared to the car my parents drove when I was a kid, it'll seem like the starship Enterprise.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Weird. I was wondering last night what would happen if one were to set of a really big nuke inside a huuricane.

Fidel would need to change his skivvies, the greenies would go apeshit, and a lot of fish would be boiled instantaneously.

That's pretty much it.

NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meterological Laboratory's FAQ: TROPICAL CYCLONE MODIFICATION AND MYTHS.

I've wondered about the iceberg thing for years now. Could we tow icebergs into the hurricane's path? How big of an iceberg would it take to depress one of these things?

I'm pretty sure it would take a bigger iceberg than we can tow to the gulf in the time between the tropical storm being detected and the hurricane making landfall.

Well, so much for science. Now consider law.

Suppose someone tries to "steer" a hurricane a bit by doing something that "might" change its direction. You can bet that someone else, whose house is erased by the hurricane, will then assert that his house was flattened only because someone else steered the hurricane toward it, that his house would have been fine otherwise, and a really big class action suit will erupt like an enormous pimple. Merit of the suit will be irrelevant; it'll happen anyway.

Know why? Because it happened when people tried seeding clouds to produce rain.

Why not drop a MOAB (I cannot remember the real name of this bomb) the mother of all bombs - that 30,000 pound monster bunker buster the military tested in Florida last year. Drop one or more MOABs before the hurricane forms - when it is a tropical storm. Maybe that might be enough to dissipate the storm before a hurricaine can form.

That's smaller than the big nuke.

Nope, we ain't going to do anything but dodge and rebuild until we figure out how to make and use antimatter. And when we do that, we've got a first class ticket to the rest of the galaxy, and hurricanes won't be much of an issue anymore.

The best thing we can do is change the rules on personal aircraft, encourage the development of models that ordinary people can afford and use safely, and then scatter our population to the four winds and let them evacuate a hell of a lot faster than they do now. Of course that'll also boost our energy usage, but it won't involve antimatter.

> Logically, you'll need to apply an amount somewhat proportional to the power of the hurricane itself.

Nope. A mouse can trip a horse, even though it doesn't have a prayer against stomp or charge.

How about the people who live along the coast getting used to the idea that Big Storms Happen!!!
A if they don like it, Friggin' MOVE SOMEWHERE ELSE. Whaaaa, the city flooded. Whaaaaa, The sea wall sucks. Whaaa, the govn't doesn't care. Sick of it I am, sick, sick, sick.

Vodka Science 3000

You have to love all the "science" being thrown around.
"Help me Senator Kennedy, your our only hope!"
Now that is really scary!

The problem is not so much to generate enough power to change a hurricane, but to predict what will happen when you try. When our best computer models can't even predict the temperature three days hence within 5 degrees in a small column of air, does anyone really think we can predict what will happen to a hurricane when we set off a nuclear explosion inside it, much less one every twenty minutes for twenty-four hours?

No doubt some you y'all have heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Do any of these ideas about how to push, pull, mutate, or obliterate hurricanes contain any speculation about what might happen to weather patterns in general or ocean currents, or good ol' spaceship earth if go monkeying around with a few too many 'canes?

No, you need to think Niven. Put up a whole shitload of space elevators, join them at their tops, put up heat-radiation grids, then place a huge switchable array of heatsinks on the ocean floor. When a hurricane approaches, connect the radiation grids at the top of the elevators to the heatsinks on the ocean floor via thermal superconducting cable. Cool the water down to 60 degrees Fahrenheit or so. Might play havoc with the fish and shrimp, though. But the load of cold water in the hurricane's path will suck a great deal of energy from the hurricane, and more importantly seriously impede the flow of energy into the storm. You say a hurricane dissipates a huge amount of energy; that requires that the hurricane consume a great deal of energy.

Not serious about any of the above, but you've got to be thinking on that scale to even consider doing anything at all about hurricanes.

Go read http://www.rednova.com/news/science/249362/scientists_you_cant_modify_hurricanes/index.html, and then forget about it.

Oh, come on! Everybody knows my Dark Master, er, Karl Rove caused that explosion in Gaza by using HAARP to detonate the munitions by remote microwave induction! Why can't we do that to hurricanes?

This is truly bad science. Vaporizing water in the eye of the storm would only strengthen it. Even if you could steer it this way you would be creating an even stronger storm hitting somewhere else.

Surely the best way to reduce hurricane strength is to dissipate the energy in the first place. I've see vertical wind generators that consist of an enormous verticle tube that takes in air at the surface with turbines inside. If you are going to go for ridiculous mega-engineering that sounds more practical. Of course, they would be destroyed when the first hurricane hit, even if it is weaker.