The organization/structure you speak of is inherent and develops automatically because of gravity and the rotation of the planet. Warm air is compelled to rise; adding moisture, as tropical oceans will do, makes that air rise even higher (see moist adiabatic lapse rate). When that air rises, surround low-level air moves toward the low-pressure area that’s left behind, and rotation - your “organization” - automatically develops.
Landforms do induce a bit of drag on the rotating windmass once a storm makes landfall, but the bigger factor is the lack of warm tropical water beneath it; it’s like pulling the plug on an out-of-control floor polisher.
Adding energy to a storm at any stage of development is not going to make it dissipate.
I’m not a science talking guy, but with your experience in dealing with those big numbers, maybe you have a better shot at working this out.
According to this, a hurricane contains 100 billion pounds of water. How much energy would be needed to raise the temperature of that much water by just 1 degree? I’m not clear on how to do that calculation, but it would seem to me:
A nuclear-powered aircraft wouldn’t seem to output more energy than a similar conventionally-powered aircraft, since it isn’t like a jet airplane is flying at 600 knots and a nuclear plane at 25 Mach;
If any airplane did actually put out that much energy as exhaust, we’d already have a lot bigger problems on our hands.
Exactly. What if you heated the “low-pressure area “ with the missile for a few hours or days ? The heat will stop the area to be of low pressure and will temporarily stop the influx of surrounding air. And the premise is that this will disrupt the storm formation.
The question is how much energy will you need to do this and will a nuclear missile be able to provide this energy ?
The ultimate (sci-fi?) solution would suck the potential energy out of the ocean water and incipient cyclones and leave you with clean energy (to power flying cars and what not)
I feel this is highly patronizing. I am aware of the nuclear energy needed for HURRICANES- there are many other threads on the SDMB addressing the infeasibility of the effort.
This post is about what happens before Hurricanes form at the tropical depression stage or earlier. At this stage the system is fairly low energy (or maybe not) that humans can effect further organization of the system.
Why by a third and not a hundredth or a thousandth ? Do you have a cite that shows that energy required to disrupt a nascent tropical depression is of that order ?
I saw nothing in your links referencing the heat output of such engines. Maybe if you provide that, we could do some back of the envelope calculations.
So, I looked at Wikipedia for some info. I realize it’s not a terribly authoritative source, but it’s usually good for a first cut/overview. Per the page on tropical cyclones, “a tropical cyclone releases heat energy at the rate of 50 to 200 exajoules (1018 J) per day, equivalent to about 1 PW (1015 watt). This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.”
Note that a “tropical depression” is a type of tropical cyclone, with (relatively) low wind speeds. So, presumably a tropical depression’s heat energy release would be on the low end of the above estimates, but those are still huge. I Am Also Not a Nuclear Aeronautical Engineer, but given those numbers, it seems to me that flying a nuclear-powered missile around it, or a few dozen, or a few hundred, wouldn’t make any measurable difference.
Also note that nuclear-powered missiles have highly radioactive exhausts. For a doomsday weapon, that’s a feature, not a bug. If you fly one around a tropical depression, though, I don’t think you disperse the storm, I think you just wind up with a radioactive storm.
Cite : “The flight reactor was intended to have thermal power in excess of 500 megawatts, but to prove the concept a sub-scale reactor was built first. This reactor, designated Tory II-A, had a design power of 155 megawatts. It heated incoming air to a temperature of 1080 °C, and had a flow rate of 320 kg/sec”Project Pluto
Even assuming a Very Powerful Missile, you’d just be doing the same thing to the air that the ocean is doing: adding heat. You’re just creating a larger, more energetic mass of air that wants to rise even faster. It’s a bit like sending a guy below deck on the Titanic to work on the hull with a Sawzall in an effort to keep the ship from sinking. :dubious:
And then there is the matter of relative scale. gdave’s conversion of 1 PW should read 10[sup]15[/sup] watts. As in one thousand gigawatts, or one million megawatts. Since there currently are no known specifications for the thermal power of a nuclear-powered cruise missile, I’ll offer a better known figure: the humble Boeing 747. It burns 10-11 tonnes of fuel per hour at cruise. Jet fuel (let’s call it kerosene) has a higher heating value of 46.2 MJ/kg. So:
10.5 tonnes per hour = 2.92 kg/s
actual total power output = 46,200,000 J/kg * 2.92 kg/s = 134.75 megawatts.
Compared to gdave’s tropical cyclone, which is releasing 1,000,000 megawatts.
If you could take that kind of power out of the cyclone you’d at least be moving the energy tally in the right direction, if only by 0.013%. But adding energy is exactly the wrong approach.
Edit: I see now that you’ve referenced a spec for the Pluto vehicle’s nuclear propulsion unit of 500 megawatts thermal power. So you can change the percentage to 0.05% (although it’d still be moving things in the wrong direction).
The idea of the original post is not to match the total energy of the Hurricane or the Tropical Storm.
The idea is to break up the Organization of the tropical depression into lot of smaller storms by not allowing a single big organization. So say a Category 5 Hurricane is broken to 10 (or 20) small tropical storms.
The nuclear heat output of the missile does not need be equal to that of the tropical storm system just enough to interrupt it to become bigger and more organized. The result will be lots of smaller storms with the same total energy (when added) as one large storm/hurricane.
You’d have to physically separate the original air mass into 10-20 smaller air masses and move them apart by sufficient distance so that each one would become its own small low-pressure system.
At which point you now have 10-20 hurricane seeds, each over its own separate body of warm tropical waters, gathering energy. People are going to be very angry at you.
See post number 23 above. Essentially, the storm is formed by hot (humid and lighter) air rising upwards and creating a low pressure area where surrounding air moves in creating a circulatory effect that builds on itself. You remove the low pressure area (by adding heat for a day or two) and effectively break the cycle temporarily i.e. another cycle starts when you stop adding heat.