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Can hurricanes be weakened using oil slicks or other techniques? Rhett A. Butler, mongabay.com September 21, 2005 Hurricane Katrina was the most expensive natural disaster in the history of the United States. Hurricane Rita threatens to add to the 2005 hurricane season's toll. Is there anything that can be done about these deadly and destructive storms? The answer is someday there may be ways to reduce the intensity of these tropical storms but in the meantime, the best option is to avoid new construction in hurricane-prone regions. Today researchers are experimenting with other approaches to moderate hurricanes and tropical storms. Some meteorologists believe that small changes in the temperature in and around a hurricane can shift its path or disrupt its intensity.
Since hurricanes draw their power from evaporating sea water, cutting off the supply of warm water available to them could reduce their strength. Operating on this premise, Hoffman suggests another tactic involving the application of "a thin film of a biodegradable oil" to slow the evaporation that serves as the fuel for a hurricane. A great deal more research is needed to determine where such a strategy is feasible especially with a large hurricane that may cover hundreds of square miles of ocean surface. Other approaches involving the towing of icebergs or detonation of nuclear weapons pose more risk that potential meteorological protection. Meteorological control raises issues While technical solutions to such weather phenomena may someday be possible, there are a host of issues that must be resolved. For example, who would determine what tropical storms and hurricanes would be targeted? Each year there are several dozen weather disturbances, of which only five or so actually become hurricanes. Further, "what if intervention causes a hurricane to damage another country's territory?" asks Hoffman. Or, what if countries start to use weather as a weapon of mass destruction? At the moment these questions are somewhat academic. For now the focus should be on the wisdom of continuing to build on lands that are highly susceptible to hurricane damage. As the oceans warm, hurricanes are only going to get stronger and pose an ever greater threat to low-lying cities and coastal areas. Can hurricanes be stopped? Related articles: San Diego has been hit by hurricanes in the past and could be affected by such storms in the future according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). While a hurricane in San Diego would likely produce significantly less damage than Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, it could still exact a high cost to Southern California especially if the region was caught off guard. Nuclear war could cause global cooling (i.e. block global warming) 11-December-2006 Nuclear war would disrupt global climate for at least a decade according to new research presented Dec. 11 at the annual meeting of American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. The research, based on findings from historic volcano eruptions, found that a small-scale, regional nuclear war could produce millions of tons of "soot" particles that could block solar radiation, in effect, cooling the planet. What is a Category 5 Hurricane? - 21-September-2005 Hurricane Rita just strengthened to a Category 5 hurricane. A Category 5 hurricane is the strongest and most severe class of hurricane. The scale, known as the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale, classifies hurricanes by the intensity of their sustained winds, storm surge and flooding, developed in 1969 by civil engineer Herbert Saffir and National Hurricane Center director Bob Simpson. Tampa Bay could be hit by 25-foot storm surge in Category 4 hurricane - 16-September-2005 A Category 4 hurricane could cause a storm surge of as much as 25 feet in Tampa Bay, according to a University of Central Florida researcher who is looking at the risks Florida cities face from tidal surges and flooding. Number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has nearly doubled over past 35 years - 16-September-2005 The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes worldwide has nearly doubled over the past 35 years, even though the total number of hurricanes has dropped since the 1990s, according to a study by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The shift occurred as global sea surface temperatures have increased over the same period. The research appears in the September 16 issue of Science. Environmental problems worsened Hurricane Katrina's impact - 31-August-2005 The loss of coastal marshlands that buffer New Orleans from flooding and storm surges may have worsened the impact of Hurricane Katrina. Hurricanes getting stronger due to global warming says study - 29-August-2005 Late last month an atmospheric scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a study in Nature that found hurricanes have grown significantly more powerful and destructive over the past three decades. Kerry Emanuel, the author of the study, warns that since hurricanes depend on warm water to form and build, global climate change might increase the effect of hurricanes still further in coming years. Further reading
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. Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by (fill in the blank) ? NOAA There have been numerous techniques that we have considered over the years to modify hurricanes: seeding clouds with dry ice or Silver Iodide, cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs, changing the radiational balance in the hurricane environment by absorption of sunlight with carbon black, exploding the hurricane apart with hydrogen bombs, and blowing the storm away from land with giant fans, etc. [an error occurred while processing this directive] This article used information from Wikipedia, the National Hurricane Center, and Scientific American. News index | RSS | Add to MyYahoo! Advertisements: Organic Apparel from Patagonia | Insect-repelling clothing |
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