I looked at post 23. You assert that adding heat will attenuate the low pressure zone, but you don’t say how.
In the post just above this one, you again assert that adding heat diminishes the low pressure area, but again without answering Troutman’s question: how does adding heat reduce the low-pressure zone?
It seems to me that by heating a previously-cool air mass, it will rise. Since the low-pressure zone exists because of rising air, making more air rise would tend to amplify the low-pressure zone in magnitude, area or both. I suspect others in this thread are thinking along the same lines.
So, for those of us in the same cognitive boat, how does adding heat (and causing more air to rise) “remove the low-pressure area” of a storm?
Say you explode a firecracker or bomb in air. The energy released heats up the air, the local pressure goes up and then the hot air flows around presumably in a big spherical path. (It’s an analogy , we are not exploding bombs)
For what it’s worth, total power of sunlight over 1 square mile is about 2.6 gigawatts (i.e. 2600 MW). So a 500MW reactor is comparable to amount of sunlight in 1/5 of a square mile.
Let me try illustrate this with a different example.
Say I have tall vertical glass cylinder say about a foot long and 2 inches in diameter. I drill a hole across the cross-section at 1/2 ft from the bottom and insert an electrical heating element (which I can turn on when needed)
Now I slide a lighted cigarette to the bottom of the cylinder. After a few minutes, there is good equilibrium and I can see the light smoke rise up in laminar flow from the bottom and dissipate at the top. Presumably colder lighter air pours in from the sides of the cylinder and settles down. Now this is a flow path that is steady.
Now suppose I turn on the heating element in the middle of the cylinder. Since the element heats up the air in its plane, the smoke below is no longer lighter than the air above. Also the cold air that was flowing in from the sides is interrupted in flow (continuity effect). You have effectively broken the stable flow regime. The system will realize a new equilibrium if you keep the heating element on for a long time. But the intent is to just disturb the steady flow long enough so that the organization (the smooth flow of smoke up and cool air down ) is disturbed.
The idea is to keep turning the heating element on every few minutes to disturb the steady pattern.
Average ocean depth is about 2.3 miles. If the ocean absorbed all the heat from the sun that provided 2.6 gigawatts/sq mile for 12 hours, the temperature of the water will only go up by 0.0008 K or 0.0014 degrees F.
Think about the overall energy balance. 500MW is nothing compared to the energies of these systems. What you’re suggesting is akin to popping a few little firecrackers to stop or redirect a steamroller.
Its not about 500 MW versus the energy of the storm as pointed out earlier.
Look there is a thermal (energy ) balance over the oceans - that energy balance happens either by the ocean slowly reflecting back the energy to outer space, forming normal rain clouds, lots of small storms or occasionally the big hurricanes.
The big hurricanes don’t happen over one day, rather they are systems that takes several days and travels around the ocean to pickup more and more energy in an exponential fashion. The idea is to prevent this exponential growth by interrupting the loop (i.e. break a large system into many smaller ones).
You are asserting that the energy needed to break it up even at a nascent stage is huge; almost comparable to the magnitude of the final hurricane. I have no analysis either to agree or disagree with that.
Look as I said before, weather systems like storms and hurricanes are non-linear systems and they are highly dependent on initial conditions. So a butterfly can cause an hurricane and by the same logic, a butterfly can also stop a hurricane.
Hurricanes don’t start off at big scales. It’s rather like the feedback loop on microphones.
If you can influence a hurricane in the early stages of formation, I don’t think that the energy needed is very high but maybe it is - that’s the data/analysis I am looking for.
Are you suggesting that the sun heats the water equally throughout its depth? If not, then I’m not sure what this point has to do with anything.
Since you assert that heat added somewhere in the zone of depression will somehow prevent the energy from becoming organized, let’s consider the effect of adding heat from sunlight. This is primarily added at the top of the storm, opposite of where heat is added by the warm water. According to your theory, this should disrupt the storm because you would no longer have a constant, smooth flow from bottom to top.
If we assume the cloud albedo to be 0.75 (an upper-end estimate), then 25% of the sunlight is absorbed, which means more energy is being added by sunlight in every square mile than your nuke is providing. And yet hurricanes are still able to form.
So I’m less concerned with the relative energy inputs, and more concerned with your overall theory. Or…
And as for this:
You realize this is a science fiction trope, not a real thing?
Sure, the exact shape, size & timing of a storm system is highly chaotic. But if conditions are right for a storm to form, then one way or another, it’s going to form. It may only take a pebble to trigger an avalanche, but that doesn’t mean you can prevent an avalanche by throwing pebbles in the right place.