Tweet
Here's the Scientific American article. Let's face it the military gets everything first. They'll have tremdous power at their disposal, and be able to attack covertly. Scares the crap out of me, but we might as well use it in civ4.
October 2004 issue
METEOROLOGY
Controlling Hurricanes
Can hurricanes and other severe tropical storms be moderated or deflected?
By Ross N. Hoffman
Every year huge rotating storms packing winds greater than 74 miles per hour sweep across tropical seas and onto shorelines--often devastating large swaths of territory. When these roiling tempests--called hurricanes in the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific oceans, typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean--strike heavily populated areas, they can kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of property damage. And nothing, absolutely nothing, stands in their way.
But must these fearful forces of nature be forever beyond our control? My research colleagues and I think not. Our team is investigating how we might learn to nudge hurricanes onto more benign paths or otherwise defuse them. Although this bold goal probably lies decades in the future, we think our results show that it is not too early to study the possibilities.
To even consider controlling hurricanes, researchers will need to be able to predict a storm's course extremely accurately, to identify the physical changes (such as alterations in air temperature) that would influence its behavior, and to find ways to effect those changes. This work is in its infancy, but successful computer simulations of hurricanes carried out during the past few years suggest that modification could one day be feasible. What is more, it turns out the very thing that makes forecasting any weather difficult--the atmosphere's extreme sensitivity to small stimuli--may well be the key to achieving the control we seek. Our first attempt at influencing the course of a simulated hurricane by making minor changes to the storm's initial state, for example, proved remarkably successful, and the subsequent results have continued to look favorable, too.
To see why hurricanes and other severe tropical storms may be susceptible to human intervention, one must understand their nature and origins. Hurricanes grow as clusters of thunderstorms over the tropical oceans. Low-latitude seas continuously provide heat and moisture to the atmosphere, producing warm, humid air above the sea surface. When this air rises, the water vapor in it condenses to form clouds and precipitation. Condensation releases heat--the solar heat it took to evaporate the water at the ocean surface. This so-called latent heat of condensation makes the air more buoyant, causing it to ascend still higher in a self-reinforcing feedback process. Eventually, the tropical depression begins to organize and strengthen, forming the familiar eye--the calm central hub around which a hurricane spins. On reaching land, the hurricane's sustaining source of warm water is cut off, which leads to the storm's rapid weakening.
Â
Because a hurricane draws much of its energy from heat released when water vapor over the ocean condenses into clouds and rain, the first researchers to dream of taming these unruly giants focused on trying to alter the condensation process using cloud-seeding techniques--then the only practical way to try to affect weather. In the early 1960s a U.S. government-appointed scientific advisory panel named Project Stormfury performed a series of courageous (or perhaps foolhardy) experiments to determine whether that approach might work.
Project Stormfury aimed to slow the development of a hurricane by augmenting precipitation in the first rain band outside the eye wall--the ring of clouds and high winds that encircle the eye [see "Experiments in Hurricane Modification," by R. H. Simpson and Joanne S. Malkus; Scientific American, December 1964]. They attempted to accomplish this goal by seeding the clouds there with silver iodide particles dispersed by aircraft, which would serve as nuclei for the formation of ice from water vapor that had been supercooled after rising to the highest, coldest reaches of the storm. If all went as envisioned, the clouds would grow more quickly, consuming the supplies of warm, moist air near the ocean surface, thus replacing the old eye wall. This process would then expand the radius of the eye, lessening the hurricane's intensity in a manner akin to a spinning skater who extends her arms to slow down.
October 2004 issue
METEOROLOGY
Controlling Hurricanes
Can hurricanes and other severe tropical storms be moderated or deflected?
By Ross N. Hoffman
Every year huge rotating storms packing winds greater than 74 miles per hour sweep across tropical seas and onto shorelines--often devastating large swaths of territory. When these roiling tempests--called hurricanes in the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific oceans, typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean--strike heavily populated areas, they can kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of property damage. And nothing, absolutely nothing, stands in their way.
But must these fearful forces of nature be forever beyond our control? My research colleagues and I think not. Our team is investigating how we might learn to nudge hurricanes onto more benign paths or otherwise defuse them. Although this bold goal probably lies decades in the future, we think our results show that it is not too early to study the possibilities.
To even consider controlling hurricanes, researchers will need to be able to predict a storm's course extremely accurately, to identify the physical changes (such as alterations in air temperature) that would influence its behavior, and to find ways to effect those changes. This work is in its infancy, but successful computer simulations of hurricanes carried out during the past few years suggest that modification could one day be feasible. What is more, it turns out the very thing that makes forecasting any weather difficult--the atmosphere's extreme sensitivity to small stimuli--may well be the key to achieving the control we seek. Our first attempt at influencing the course of a simulated hurricane by making minor changes to the storm's initial state, for example, proved remarkably successful, and the subsequent results have continued to look favorable, too.
To see why hurricanes and other severe tropical storms may be susceptible to human intervention, one must understand their nature and origins. Hurricanes grow as clusters of thunderstorms over the tropical oceans. Low-latitude seas continuously provide heat and moisture to the atmosphere, producing warm, humid air above the sea surface. When this air rises, the water vapor in it condenses to form clouds and precipitation. Condensation releases heat--the solar heat it took to evaporate the water at the ocean surface. This so-called latent heat of condensation makes the air more buoyant, causing it to ascend still higher in a self-reinforcing feedback process. Eventually, the tropical depression begins to organize and strengthen, forming the familiar eye--the calm central hub around which a hurricane spins. On reaching land, the hurricane's sustaining source of warm water is cut off, which leads to the storm's rapid weakening.
Â
Because a hurricane draws much of its energy from heat released when water vapor over the ocean condenses into clouds and rain, the first researchers to dream of taming these unruly giants focused on trying to alter the condensation process using cloud-seeding techniques--then the only practical way to try to affect weather. In the early 1960s a U.S. government-appointed scientific advisory panel named Project Stormfury performed a series of courageous (or perhaps foolhardy) experiments to determine whether that approach might work.
Project Stormfury aimed to slow the development of a hurricane by augmenting precipitation in the first rain band outside the eye wall--the ring of clouds and high winds that encircle the eye [see "Experiments in Hurricane Modification," by R. H. Simpson and Joanne S. Malkus; Scientific American, December 1964]. They attempted to accomplish this goal by seeding the clouds there with silver iodide particles dispersed by aircraft, which would serve as nuclei for the formation of ice from water vapor that had been supercooled after rising to the highest, coldest reaches of the storm. If all went as envisioned, the clouds would grow more quickly, consuming the supplies of warm, moist air near the ocean surface, thus replacing the old eye wall. This process would then expand the radius of the eye, lessening the hurricane's intensity in a manner akin to a spinning skater who extends her arms to slow down.
Comment