Can hurricanes be weakened using oil slicks or other techniques?

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.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States government attempted to weaken hurricanes by seeding storms with silver iodide. The experiment, called Project Stormfury, sought to test the theory that the seeding would augment precipitation outside the storm’s eyewall, causing it to collapse and thus reduce the winds. The experiment proved inconclusive but it seems unlikely that such a mechanism could significantly impact the strength of a large hurricane.

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.

Scientists at the Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), an R&D consulting firm, are modeling hurricanes to see what effect atmospheric heating might have on their path and strength. In an article in the September 27th, 2004 issue of Scientific American, Ross N. Hoffman of AER suggests that an array of earth-orbiting solar power stations could eventually be used to supply sufficient energy for the disruption of hurricanes. By heating an area of ocean, scientists in the future may be theoretically able to “steer” a hurricane off its projected path if it threatens population centers. Hoffman concedes though that the amount of energy needed to achieve such an objective would be substantial.

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.

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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

Controlling Hurricanes: Can hurricanes and other severe tropical storms be moderated or deflected?
Scientific American

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.

This article used information from Wikipedia, the National Hurricane Center, and Scientific American.

Credits

Rhett Butler Editor

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