Interesting hurricane article

[Terry Kollmeyer]

Happen to stumble across this artcile earlier, you might find it interesting.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9440978/

 

[David Schuttler]

I got one phone call at work today , the caller was wanting to buy 4 tons of dry ice to drop in the eye... He really didn't have much of a plan when I asked questions about this venture he was thinking up. Turns up that when I talked with our corp. office later in the day they had also received a few calls about doing this also. :roll:

 

[Geoff Boyle]

This is nothing new; we had a sizeable debate about this last year. During almost every unusually active hurricane season, it seems like this issue is brought up time and time again.

Remember last season? When a guy, who manufactured carpet or something along that line, wanted to fly a 747 tanker above a nasty hurricane and dump his "magic absorbent carpet potion" into it. Of course, no pilot in his right mind would have done that. Therefore, the experiment never went ahead.

I'm sure numerous corporations and private individuals will find a new way to try and destroy a major hurricane. However, in my humble opinion according to what I've seen, screwing with nature is only going to make the problem worse.

Here is the link to that thread:

http://www.stormtrack.org/forum/viewtopic....ht=ivan&start=0

 

[Jeff Snyder]

Originally posted by From the article...

Other storm modification methods that have been suggested include cooling the tropical ocean with icebergs and spreading particles or films over the ocean surface to inhibit storms from evaporating heat from the sea.

I wonder how that "evaporating heat from the sea" thing is working... :lol:

I suppose it seems reasonable that something floating/sitting on top of the sea surface may inhibit evaporation (and thus decrease latent heating, which helps drive a hurricane). However, I can't imagine this "stuff" wouldn't get mixed from below thanks to >30' waves and extreme turbulence at the sea-air interface courtesy of high winds. Not to mention, we know that sea spray is a significant contributor to condensation nuclei distribution/makeup, drive by things like sea spray, etc.

 

[David Wolfson]

[Edit: Oops! This thread really shouldn't be in this forum....]

As you say, Jeff, I'm also pretty sure that most of the energy available to the core of a solid tropical storm or better doesn't come from pan evaporation from the ocean surface such that a thin film could control. Rather it comes from the turbulent shredding and atomization of the top ocean layer in the strong winds where a thin film couldn't possibly stand up. To do much good IMHO, you'd have to spread the film over a wide area to prevent a tropical depression from having enough latent energy (which does come mainly from evaporation) to spin up. The trouble is, in doing so you bottle up the energy as sensient heat in the ocean; and make it all the worse if and when a storm does bust it loose.

How the heck do you get a huge-enough iceberg into the Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean to do any good? If we can manage that we can certainly manage to build big seawalls along the coast so we don't need to worry about herding icebergs.