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What would a jet blast do to a tornado?

Raymond Mason

Raymond Mason

EF1
Joined
Feb 12, 2013
Messages
56
Hi! You know, me and my father were talking about jet engines and he made me realize how incredibly powerful they are. Now there are signs near air ports that warn you about jet blasts since it produces winds around 120 MPH.

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jet engine blast can up-root trees, flatten building structures, shatter windows, lift and propel heavy objects, weathercock braked airplanes, blow over lift trucks, shift unbraked baggage carts, and create other havoc on airport ramps, taxiways, and runways.

Now, my question is, would a jet blast weaken, strengthen, or even destroy a tornado? I am talking about the average tornado and the freakishly strong EF4 + kind. Could it even make the tornado change its path?

What do you think?
 
You have to remember a tornado is a process and not an object - we then need to consider how the 'blast' from a jet engine might alter the process. The main thing to consider is how much air a jet engine 'shifts' and how much air is ingested into a tornado. A much smaller amount of air passes through a jet engine per second than is being ingested into a tornado, so despite the blast from the jet being very powerful (massive exit velocity at the exit of the engine) the fact it's a very narrow 'jet' means that it fairly quickly loses this velocity through friction/mixing with the surrounding air. Quite apart from the fact that trying to get a jet engine into position around a tornado is near impossible, I think the overall effect would be fairly negligible. Others might be able to consider suitable equations to show this!
 
Thank for the responses guys! Now, this is why I think it would work.


At around 5:36 you will notice a strong wind hits the tornado down below it and blew the tornado "away" displacing the funnel and creating an awesome elephant trunk. So I figured if winds can manipulate the tornado naturally, then I thought we could manipulate it artificially.

I don't know much about physics so there might be some complex reason why it wouldn't work. That jet tank looks awesome, I didn't even know such a thing existed. So I guess it is not out of the question to preform an experiment after all. I am just very curious, if it could in fact manipulate a tornado then we could possibly use that knowledge to our advantage.
 
Hmm, I took the width of the jet into consideration, what I didn't consider is just how wide the average tornado is. The average width of a tornado is about 250 feet wide and the biggest monster jet we currently have is 18 feet wide. So we would need 14 of those jet engines lined up in a row to match the width of an average tornado.

To run each of these engines for one minute all at the same time would cost you 357,000 dollars. So pretty much you would be bankrupt instantly unless you were like mega rich like christopher lloyd with a net worth of 70 million dollars.

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Now if Christopher felt like burning his money on such an insane idea, how much would it cost him?

Well, the average tornado life span is about 10 minutes, so if he was right at ground zero and ran the engines the entire time until the tornado died it would cost him 3.5 million dollars. If those jet engines were donated to him.

If he had to custom order those jet engines it would cost him 378 million dollars.

Oh, I guess Christopher would be -308,000,000 in his bank account so I guess he cannot run the engines. All of this to maybe possibly move the tornado a couple of yards, and if the tornado would hit those very dangerously expensive jets loaded with very dangerous jet fuel the results would be..yeah..There goes 378 million dollars worth of equipment and Christophers mansion he has to sell to pay his debt off from those engines.
 
That wouldn't disrupt the tornado - that would simply interfere with the local circulation for a few seconds as the tornado passed by. As noted above - the tornado is connected thousands of feet into the storm. What happens in the lowest 18 feet won't be enough to kill it.

Similar to those who think that a lightning bolt starting 3 miles up in the sky will not bother them because you are standing on 1/8" of rubber soles.
 
@Paul Knightley gave, in my opinion, the most informative explanation for why this wouldn't work. However, Raymond, your scaling argument is missing a dimension - the vertical. As a tornado is a 3-D object and process, you would need to disrupt more than the lowest layer of air immediately in contact with the surface to defeat the tornado. Imagine you scrounged up the money and resources and got the engines to the perfect spot to blast a tornado. Even if your initial blast was enough to disrupt the vortex structure immediately near the ground, your blast would do nothing to the remainder of the vortex, and thus the surface section you blasted away would recover as the remainder of the vortex and the associated flows and processes resumed their regular activities, thus allowing the surface segment to rebuild.

Of course, you could always say "well then let's just leave the engines on and move with the tornado to keep the surface-based segment constantly disrupted". That might work, except you'd replace a destructive naturally occurring phenomenon with a destructive man-made rampage (the engines would blow away everything in their path, too).

This feels like a good entry for Randall Munroe's "What-If" series on his website (http://what-if.xkcd.com/)
 
Jeff Duda said:
@Paul Knightley gave, in my opinion, the most informative explanation for why this wouldn't work. However, Raymond, your scaling argument is missing a dimension - the vertical. As a tornado is a 3-D object and process, you would need to disrupt more than the lowest layer of air immediately in contact with the surface to defeat the tornado. Imagine you scrounged up the money and resources and got the engines to the perfect spot to blast a tornado. Even if your initial blast was enough to disrupt the vortex structure immediately near the ground, your blast would do nothing to the remainder of the vortex, and thus the surface section you blasted away would recover as the remainder of the vortex and the associated flows and processes resumed their regular activities, thus allowing the surface segment to rebuild.

Of course, you could always say "well then let's just leave the engines on and move with the tornado to keep the surface-based segment constantly disrupted". That might work, except you'd replace a destructive naturally occurring phenomenon with a destructive man-made rampage (the engines would blow away everything in their path, too).

This feels like a good entry for Randall Munroe's "What-If" series on his website (http://what-if.xkcd.com/)
Click to expand...

From a Bear's Cage post today:

http://xkcd.com/1754/

"Must add: Avoid large jet engines...."
 
Thanks for the response guys. Its been quiet educational, a jet engine was the only thing that I could think of that could of MAYBE of done something.

"Of course, you could always say "well then let's just leave the engines on and move with the tornado to keep the surface-based segment constantly disrupted". That might work, except you'd replace a destructive naturally occurring phenomenon with a destructive man-made rampage (the engines would blow away everything in their path, too)."

Nah, could point them at a 45 degree angle to avoid trees/homes. On top of being incredibility impractical, those engines would weigh down whatever you were driving so hard a snail could out run you. I could send it in to that what if website.
 
Dan Robinson got video of a commercial airliner flying through a weak tornado. It didn't seem to have much of an effect on either the tornado or the airplane.

 
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