While there are no doubt some cases in which an average Joe had an idea that became adopted against the conventional wisdom, your hubris is astonishing. Your thoughts on this are superior to those of NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division? No one there has done any computer modeling? Why don’t you take off your tin foil hat and leave the scientists to their work.
Meh. I didn’t feel the need to qualify “existing” onto nuclear weapons, but the things we’ve designed for military purposes are built at a certain power level, not made infinitely large.
Y’know, some people see all those nukes sitting there forlorn and unused and really, really want to put them to some useful end…
But really, folks: in the end, the ocean and atmosphere will balance out the thermal gradient regardless of the inconvenience it may cause the apes with pants. If people insist on building houses of lightweight easily-blown-away materials and placing them in the flood zone, that’s *our *problem.
We’re not going to be able to blow up even a majority of tornados or supercells, especially with how unpredictable they are (are we going to deploy a half dozen MOABs to every intermediate airport across the Plains?), and for the big storms setting off dozens of nukes in the atmosphere every year seems like a solution in search of a problem.
If any computer modeling whatsoever has been done, it has not been presented. The only numbers I’ve seen are rudimentary back-of-the-envelope calculations using 8th grade math. Simply stated, the NOAA responses were not serious investigations. It appears whoever wrote it had not even read the published literature on the subject.
One of the papers can be seen on page 78 of this document, “Some Speculations on the Effects of Nuclear Explosions on Hurricanes” (Reed, 1959):
The few people who have seriously researched this never argued that an H-bomb could somehow “snuff out” a hurricane. They fully understood the latent heat energy in a hurricane is much greater than an H-bomb. Rather the theory was a 20 megaton device detonated in the hurricane eye would displace upward the heat engine driving the hurricane, causing colder air to rush in. This would be similar to how a hurricane weakens when making landfall, just a lot faster.
Nobody knows if it would have worked, and those early researchers never definitively claimed it would work, they just suggested a possibility worth pursuing (in the mindset of that era).
Back then if computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and supercomputers had been available, you could be sure they’d have run models to investigate. Those technologies exist today, are affordable and widely available but have apparently never been used to study this.
Hurricanes seem to be stable enough to reform after encountering cross-winds, or stumbling over islands. They aren’t balanced upon a point of instability, just waiting for a small disruption in a vital location – which would be necessary for this idea to work.
(A freight-train is easily derailed: just rip out one section of rail. But a hurricane is more like a stampede of cattle: killing “just the right cow” doesn’t work.)
I’ll bet that would [SCTV]blow up real good![/SCTV]
Bolding mine
Just to be clear, I didn’t use these advanced and sophisticated mathematical theories and techniques … I noted one number was the size of Big Bird and the other the size of Elmo then sang the song Which of these things are not like the others …
Seriously, the power of a nuclear bomb looks like less than 1% the power of a hurricane … but only for a single second of time … seems likely this is safely ignored.
There are two ways to measure hurricane energy:
(1) Energy released through rain/cloud formation: about 6E14 Watts, or 3.6E16 joules per minute.
(2) Kinetic (wind) energy produced: 1.5E12 watts, or or 9.0E13 joules per minute.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html
The 50 megaton Russian Tsar Bomba released 2.09E17 joules of energy, or 5.8 times the total energy a hurricane releases each minute.
That bomb released 2,322 times the total energy the combined winds of an entire hurricane releases each minute.
So already-tested bombs release vastly more energy than a hurricane does in a minute, and there is no real upper limit to the size of a bomb.
Comparing based on long-term cumulative release of hurricane energy is invalid and misleading. An oil well fire if left unattended might release a huge amount of total energy over days of time. However it can be blown out by an explosive charge which releases far less energy.
Nobody really knows if a large nuclear weapon would deflect or weaken a hurricane because (despite now having the technology) it has never been modeled. There is no way this could be used because of the nuclear test ban treaty, but the question is a hypothetical one – like many on this forum – and need not have a realizable implementation to be a useful topic for learning.
Good point.
I don’t think this logic necessarily follows however. A system may be vulnerable to disruption even if it doesn’t have a clear central point of weakness; a spark may cause the whole thing to go up in flames.
Again the implicit assumption seems to be that to disrupt a system you need a force of similar magnitude to the total force of the system. But this assumption is in fact false.
Let me be clear (since people such as CC upthread perhaps thought I was arguing with the consensus). I think the answer right now is something like: “Apart from one or two speculative papers, which did not present computer models, we have no reason to suppose a present-day atom bomb could be used to significantly disrupt a hurricane’s intensity or course”
What I’m taking exception to is just the logic of Atom bomb = small, Hurricane = big, therefore physically impossible.
Another bravo to mrsmith without a qualifier that his post quotes from a link cited upstream of his.
It was a favor to us, took intellectual effort and some time.
Your citation states that this kinetic wind energy is only for horizontal winds, and that most of the energy is used for the vertical winds. The article does allow the use of either (1) or (2), and I think (1) is a more accurate number for the amount of energy transferred.
You’re using a considerably higher conversion factor for Megatons to Joules, and I’m perfectly fine using your numbers. You’re using total energy released whereas I’m using energy released per unit time, or power. Yes, I agree that the Tsar Bomb is far far more powerful during that second it explodes, but the second before and the second after the Tsar Bomb is producing no power. I’m also taking into consideration power per unit area. Sure, the Tsar Bomb would take out the largest cities, but Typhoon Tip stretched from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. If we let go our Tsar Bomb in Berlin, Germany; the wind fields in Madrid, Spain, would be unaffected.
A VEI 8 volcanic eruption would tear up a hurricane … but that’s less about energy and more about thousand of cubic kilometers of 1,000ºC rocks flying at the speed of sound.
Which is why it’s better to use power instead of total energy released.
Well, we’re taking ordinary evidence and fashioning ordinary claims … we’ll need extraordinary evidence if we want to make extraordinary claims. I think the furthest we can go is the Tsar Bomb denting the troposphere causing turbulence. We might find this insignificant compared to boundary layer friction. The citation states that hurricanes are only 8 miles tall, yet sometimes hundreds of miles in diameter … this isn’t flat as a pancake, more like flat as a crepe. Every feature on that weather map you’re looking at is no taller than a sheet of paper.
If you use power instead of energy, then you can’t just say that a nuke is much smaller than a hurricane, because a nuke has far greater power than a hurricane.
What’s the point?
Hurricanes are necessary for heat transport to northern latitudes, and it’s just a stupid idea to be causing long-term environmental damage due to fallout to prevent some hurricane damage.
I dont know about that but they did play around with attaching dynamite to poles around towns with the hope of setting them off and doing the same.
What are you talking about? 1 megaton is equal to 4.18E15 joules. The 50 megaton Tsar Bomba was 50 times that or 2.092E17 joules. You can do the math right from the Google command line: type “4.18E15*50=” (no quotes) and it will calculate it for you. Where did you read there was a different number of joules per megaton than this? The 4.18E15 number is in hundreds of references.
Again, I am mystified. You cannot compare a nuclear bomb to a hurricane using power. Power is instantaneous output or rate of energy conversion per unit time. A fusion bomb produces incredible power for a brief instant. It releases most of its energy within 1/10th of a microsecond, which for 50 mt is a power output of 2.092E23 watts, or 209.2 quintillion watts. By contrast the average power output of a hurricane is only 6E14 watts or 600 trillion watts – 349 million times less. Using power instead of total energy released is NOT the way to compare.
Power is measured in watts, horsepower or joules per second. Energy is capacity for doing work and is measured in joules, ergs or BTU.
It’s better to compare energy released over some period of time, such as how much energy a hurricane releases in an hour or a day vs a nuclear bomb. At least that gives some vaguely meaningful number.
The extraordinary claims being made – without any evidence or models – are the unequivocal statements that a nuclear bomb would make no impact whatsoever on a hurricane. That is being made by people who have not studied it, have not modeled it, and apparently have not even read the published literature.
By contrast the suggestion – not claim – made by people who actually studied it was that a powerful nuclear bomb might possibly affect a hurricane. That is not extraordinary in any way.
That’s true…but sort of misleading, because that energy is released into the atmosphere, which buffers it, so that the effective power, for human purposes (e.g., someone standing near ground zero at Hiroshima) will see a sharp flash of light – lasting more than a microsecond – followed by a thermal impulse – lasting several seconds – and finally blast and shock, lasting even longer – and then a heat surge from the heated atmosphere, which could last for several minutes.
If you used such a weapon to blow up a hurricane, the power would be measured over seconds and minutes, not microseconds.
Yes, for particularly complex, delicate or unstable systems with high tolerances. i.e. tossing a wrench into a jet engine.
A hurricane is simply a large transfer of thermal energy. It doesn’t have a lot of complex moving parts. A nuclear blast is just heat and air pressure (and radiation). Since the heat movement of air from a hurricane are many orders of magnitude larger than the largest atomic bombs, it would be like trying to stop a tsunami by trying to spray it back with a firehose.
Most of the energy in a nuclear bomb is released as thermal radiation and blast. The initiating nuclear energy release takes less than 1 microsecond. Most of the thermal radiation release takes 2-3 seconds – it is very brief:
Thermal release time graph: https://photos.smugmug.com/photos/i-XzqnRFz/0/O/i-XzqnRFz.jpg
Above from http://fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/thermal.htm
The blast energy release is also very brief but the effects of that only propagate at the speed of sound.
None of this changes my point which was comparing the power in joules/sec, etc. of a hurricane to the power of a nuclear bomb is misleading. Power is essentially an instantaneous unit, measured in watts, horsepower or joules per second. Comparing the momentary power output of a nuclear bomb to a hurricane tells us nothing. It is better to compare the energy released over some time period, or a variety of time periods.
I should think that a nuclear blast in or near the eye would make the hurricane worse by adding energy to the system. A blast on the periphery of the storm would more than likely establish a secondary storm system, perhaps counter-rotating. I am not sure why people would think that adding energy to a hurricane would necessarily disrupt it.
I’m perfectly fine using your numbers.
I’m not sure we can use “instantaneous output” and “per unit time” in the same sentence …
I’m mystified that you don’t think power is the best way to compare energy released over some period of time.
There would be local disruption at the blast site, like touching a match to a spider web … the spider web is still there for the most part, as would a hurricane … so the case I’m making to the OP is that a nuclear explosion wouldn’t disrupt the hurricane, just one small part of it … and this localized disruption would be carried away downstream and perhaps in a few hours become indistinct.
My point is that in the six hour time interval, the hurricane generates energy 5h 59m 59.95s longer than the bomb.
That’s only half the tale; once released, where does the energy go? Specifically, why can’t any of it add to the angular momentum of the cyclone? eschereal makes an excellent point, adding energy to a system makes it more energetic. We’re going to evaporate a whole mess of water into it’s vapor state if we detonate over the ocean, it’s going to condense in the hurricane.
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Here’s a YouTube video of the Tsar bomb “Tsar Bomba - Largest Nuclear Device Ever Tested (50MT)”. The actual footage starts at 2m12s. So, above I stated above that the Tsar bomb may “dent” the troposphere. As you see in this footage, the fucker blew right through the troposphere well into the stratosphere. The top half of that mushroom cloud is above any hurricane, the bottom half would seem to be sheared off and pushed downstream.