So I decided to finish reading the article, and because I'm feeling particularly bitter at the moment, I've decided to expand upon my previous comments.
Bernard Eastlund has a score to settle. Back in 1982, Eastlund had just moved to Houston, Texas, when a tornado hit his property. The tornado didn't hurt him or his house, but it mowed down all his pine trees. "That was scary enough" he said.
Why is it that people who come up with stuff are almost invariably victims of tornadoes? How come the people who spend years studying the beasts don't dream up these ideas? Oh that's right, resentment breeds idiocy.
Eastlund believes he can prevent tornadoes by halting the formation of mesocyclones--huge, swirling columns of air that occur during thunderstorms. In a thunderstorm, warm, humid air near the ground rises. As the air moves upward, it starts to spiral. At a certain point high above the ground, the warm air runs into a layer of colder, heavier air. That cold layer acts as a barricade, forcing the spinning air back down again to form a mesocyclone. If the mesocyclone touches the ground, it becomes a more tightly coiled funnel of spinning air, or a tornado, and mayhem may ensue.
If you believe this, quit storm chasing and resign your ST membership now. Like Scott quipped (with his rapier-like wit): "and bowl-shaped racetracks spawn tornadoes." Let's continue on and see how dumb this really is.
Mesocyclones might be stopped, says Eastlund, by busting the cold air barricade with microwave radiation--the same electromagnetic waves you use to nuke popcorn in a microwave oven. According to Eastlund's calculations, raindrops in the cold barricade would absorb the microwaves and release as much as a billion watts of energy. That energy would heat the surrounding cold air and smash the cold barrier the way dynamite demolishes a concrete wall. With no barrier in place, warm, spinning air would continue rising instead of being forced back down to form mesocyclones and tornadoes.
Except that by warming the air, it would rise faster, increasing the strength of the storm. This guy needs to look at a skew-t. Cold air aloft doesn't prevent updrafts, warm air does.
How on Earth could a microwave beam nuke a mass of air? Not from Earth, but from space. Eastlund proposes having Earth-orbiting satellites do the job. Solar panels on the satellites would collect energy from the sun and convert it to microwave beams. Eastlund calls his proposed satellites Thunderstorm Solar Power Satellites (TSPS).
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) toyed with a similar idea in the 1960s as a way of creating an alternate energy source for Earth. NASA planned to have microwaves beamed down to receiving stations on Earth, where the beams would be converted to electricity.
Hmm. They haven't tried it since the 1960s...maybe it didn't work?
Eastlund first came up with his idea for blasting tornadoes during the mid1980s while working for an oil exploration company in Alaska. At the time, the U.S. government was exploring a plan called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) to shield the country from nuclear attack.
One idea for SDI involved opening a missileproof umbrella of high-energy electrons over the United States. Eastlund suggested erecting large microwave antennas, powered by Alaska's huge natural gas reservoir, that would fire microwaves into the ionosphere. The ionosphere is a layer of the upper atmosphere full of charged particles. The microwaves and the ionosphere's charged particles would interact and release hordes of electrons. Those electrons, attracted by Earth's magnetic field, would form a missileproof dome over the United States.
Again with the didn't work?
The SDI plan never went further than the development stage.
Q.E.D.
Eastlund teamed up with colleagues at the University of Oklahoma's Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms
.Bull. If I get in my car and follow the DOW around the plains, can I claim I teamed up with Josh Wurman? I'd bet good money that CAPS wasn't going along with this half-baked (half-nuked?) idea as the article implies.
Sometime in the next decade, Eastlund hopes to test his theory. To do that, he says, he will need a sophisticated Doppler radar system that can look downward from a satellite and locate mesocyclones within thunderclouds. He will also need access to instruments on board the International Space Station to create minibursts of microwaves to test whether they have enough power to heat even the slightest amount of air in a storm cloud.
Okay, so let's think about this. A WSR-88D has a pretty wide beam width at 120nm...GOES-12 is at 35775km (according to Orbitron). How big of an antenna would we need to resolve a mesocyclone on the surface? Would the moon be big enough? And what about the poor people who happen to be near an errant microwave beam? Do they get crispied?
Some scientists are skeptical of Eastlund's idea.
If by some you mean all, then yes.
Eastlund is optimistic, though. He hopes that by the time he's ready to start running experiments, a new generation of scientists and engineers will be helping him out. Already, he's heard from one interested middle school student. Eastlund helped the boy create a mini-mockup of his satellite system, "One of my proudest moments," said Eastlund, "was [when] the 11-year-old [got] an A+ on his science project."
He hopes that this new generation will be stupid enough to go along with him. Sure, he can convince an 11 year-old. Just wait til the 11 year-old starts studying the atmosphere. Ooops. Wait another generation I guess.
In conclusion, is this guy a degreed physicist or just some guy who plays with F=ma for fun? If he has a degree, I want to know from where and why it hasn't been snatched from his office wall in the middle of the night. As for the rest of my issues with the article....here's the e-mail I sent to
[email protected] :
I must take issue with Suzanne Mengel's 4/20/01 article entitled "Taming
twisters." While it makes for a good read, it lacks that element of
research that would make it good journalism. The physicist at the focus
of this article posesses no knowledge of the physics or thermodynamics of
the atmosphere. The concept he presents of the process of tornadogenesis
is laughable (in polite terms) to scientists and storm chasers who have given an earnest effort the study of tornadoes.
Your reporter either did not bother to do any in-depth research to find
out why the ideas presented are not practical/possible, or chose to ignore
what she found. As a scientist, I find such a one-sided presentation of
"fact" to be irresponsible and frankly reprehensible. I realize that
reporters are rarely experts on the subjects they cover, but this is so
full of error as to suggest a blantant disregard for anything more than a
sensational story. This is the only article from your site that I have
read, and it may very well be the last.
Ben
