Is Artificially Weakening/Destroying a Hurricane Possible, Even In Theory?

[HeyHomie]

Given the destruction wrought by Harvey and Irma, to say nothing of the hundreds of destructive hurricanes that came before it, I’m curious if the idea of artificially altering hurricane strength (or existence) has any basis in science. ISTR that the Navy(?) gave it a half-assed effort in the 70’s, to mixed results - but that memory is based on hazy memories of reading assignments in 11th grade Science class, and I may be way off.

Anyway, could this be done in theory? Clearly, humankind is capable of affecting the weather on a macro scale (viz climate change), but what about on a micro scale?

[Chronos]

In theory? Sure. But it would require manipulation of energies on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than what we’re currently capable of.

[HeyHomie]

@Chronos

In theory? Sure. But it would require manipulation of energies on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than what we’re currently capable of.

OK, but how?

[USCDiver]

Use a bunch of mega fans on mega boats to introduce some wind shear.

https://www.wunderground.com/education/shear.asp

[k9bfriender]

@HeyHomie

OK, but how?

My thought would be to tow an iceberg the size of a state into the path of the hurricane, then use conventional explosives to break it up into smaller chunks.

Covering the ocean with ice chunks would decrease the feeding of the hurricane, increase the pressure inside the eye, and decrease surface area.

I don’t know if this would have much of an effect, or how big an iceberg you would need, but, cooling the ocean and covering it to prevent evaporation would have an effect in the right direction, though I have no idea what sort of magnitude it would be.

[Pantastic]

There was a silly attempt made to divert Irma: #unitedwefan United, we fan: In Florida, people try to ‘blow’ Hurricane Irma away with fans | World News - Hindustan Times

Most of the realistic proposals involve changing the hurricane’s path, since it’s possible to manipulate pressure and humidity in a broad area. One of the political issues with modifying a hurricane is liability; if you divert the hurricane and it does damage where you divert it to, are you responsible for the damage? If the US diverts a hurricane into Mexico, is that an act of war by the US against Mexico? There’s a whole largely untouched field of law that would need to be sorted out before anyone would want to do something like this in the real world.

[squidfood]

You sit in Cape Verde and release butterflies whenever a breeze wafts by.

[watchwolf49]

Dehumidifing the in-flow would quench the storm … disrupting the out-flow and/or heating the air aloft … create a better pathway for energy to flow from the equator to the poles …

Really, the only practical way to disrupt hurricanes would be to stop making manufactured homes … this would also end tornadoes …

[PastTense]

The only weather modification I am aware of is cloud-seeding:

Cloud seeding

Would this do anything for hurricanes?

[Darren_Garrison]

I remember a non-fiction piece from a SF magazine (googling shows it to be Defeating the Son of Andrew by Leon O. Billig in the February 1994 issue of Analog, but no text of the article available) that proposed building a series of miles-high hollow convection towers along the coast of Florida to drain the energy from approaching hurricanes (and as a bonus using the towers to collect rainwater, and installing turbines to generate electricity.)

[bordelond]

@HeyHomie

ISTR that the Navy(?) gave it a half-assed effort in the 70’s, to mixed results - but that memory is based on hazy memories of reading assignments in 11th grade Science class, and I may be way off.

Not far off at all:

The discovery of [the eyewall replacement] process was partially responsible for the end of the U.S. government’s hurricane modification experiment Project Stormfury. This project set out to seed clouds outside the eyewall, apparently causing a new eyewall to form and weakening the storm. When it was discovered that this was a natural process due to hurricane dynamics, the project was quickly abandoned

Project Stormfury was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones by flying aircraft into them and seeding with silver iodide. The project was run by the United States Government from 1962 to 1983.

The hypothesis was that the silver iodide would cause supercooled water in the storm to freeze, disrupting the inner structure of the hurricane. This led to the seeding of several Atlantic hurricanes. However, it was later shown that this hypothesis was incorrect. It was determined most hurricanes do not contain enough supercooled water for cloud seeding to be effective. Additionally, researchers found that unseeded hurricanes often undergo the same structural changes that were expected from seeded hurricanes. This finding called Stormfury’s successes into question, as the changes reported now had a natural explanation.

The last experimental flight was flown in 1971, due to a lack of candidate storms and a changeover in NOAA’s fleet. More than a decade after the last modification experiment, Project Stormfury was officially canceled. Although a failure in its goal of reducing the destructiveness of hurricanes, Project Stormfury was not without merit. The observational data and storm lifecycle research generated by Stormfury helped improve meteorologists’ ability to forecast the movement and intensity of future hurricanes.

[watchwolf49]

@PastTense

The only weather modification I am aware of is cloud-seeding:
Cloud seeding - Wikipedia

Would this do anything for hurricanes?

If cloud seeding worked (and that’s not been shown yet), then it would increase rainfall rates and accelerate the hurricane, making the hurricane worse … plus we’d need dozens of commercial jets to get enough “seed” into the storm … so unfeasible, unproven and it would do the opposite of what we want …

[watchwolf49]

@watchwolf49

If cloud seeding worked (and that’s not been shown yet), then it would increase rainfall rates and accelerate the hurricane, making the hurricane worse … plus we’d need dozens of commercial jets to get enough “seed” into the storm … so unfeasible, unproven and it would do the opposite of what we want …

Missed edit window … I humbly withdraw my comment and defer to bordelond’s wonderful addition …

[XT]

@HeyHomie

OK, but how?

Well, in theory, the two ways would be to change it’s course or disrupt the storm. Practically, as Chronos said it would take orders of magnitude more energy than we currently have access to in order to do either, but I suppose if you had access to a Kardashev level 1 civilization you could create a high-pressure or low-pressure area to divert the storm or perhaps block some of the light going to the ocean in that region sufficient to suck out enough energy to kill it that way, especially if you started killing it this way when it was just forming and had the tech to block a measurable percentage of the suns energy over say, the entire South Atlantic region (hopefully you are also smart enough to understand the unintended consequences of either of these as well :p). Or, maybe you could chill the ocean upper layers somehow (you’d be a K-1 civilization after all) to kill it that way. Or use unicorn farts and dragon dreams to do it I guess.

[DSeid]

Kurt Vonnegut’s brother Bernard had been a scientist at GE involved in cloud seeding (determined that silver iodide worked well) and indeed one of the early experiments that emerged from the team’s work was “Project Cirrus” which appeared to alter the course of a hurricane … just not the direction they had been thinking it would go. Bernard’s work was the inspiration for Ice-9 in Cat’s Cradle.

… Schaefer and Langmuir continued their work by assisting the U.S. military in advisory for Project Cirrus. This was the first large study of cloud physics and weather modification with its main goal to try to weaken hurricanes.

On October 13, 1947, an airplane dropped nearly 180 pounds of crushed dry ice into a hurricane that was heading west to east and out to sea. Though the crew reported “Pronounced modification of the cloud deck seeded,” there’s no proof to say seeding affected the storm. The hurricane changed direction and instead made landfall near Savannah, Georgia. There was public outcry, as the storm was devastating. The public blamed cloud seeding. Langmuir claimed that the reversal had been caused by human intervention. Cirrus was canceled and lawsuits were threatened. The litigation ended because of a 1906 hurricane that had taken a similar path.

This incident set back cloud seeding for more than a decade. …

Probably it was a coincidence but here’s an article on other ideas that have been thought about.

For ocean temperatures, the magic number for hurricane formation is 26.5 degrees Celsius (or 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit). So what if you could nudge that number down early on and reduce the risks and intensities of ensuing storms?

That was what Salter set out to do.

To cool the surface of the ocean, Salter invented a wave-powered pump that would move warm surface water down to depths as far as about 650 feet.

Made from a ring of tires lashed together around a tube extending below the surface, waves would overtop the ring, pushing the column of water down, while a check valve in the tube would keep it from flowing back. …

… Salter’s other tactic for fighting hurricanes is making clouds a tiny bit brighter using aerosols, harnessing a phenomenon called the Twomey effect.

This is the observation that for clouds containing the same amount of moisture, the clouds with smaller suspended water droplets reflect more sunlight.

The increased sunlight reflectance in the sky would keep the waters below from warming up to the hurricane threshold while also curbing evaporation, thereby reducing the atmospheric moisture needed to make a storm.

“If you really want to stop hurricanes, I believe that cloud brightening is the better way to do it,” Salter said. Cloud brightening yields a much greater impact on the weather for a much smaller perturbation than directly cooling the ocean, he explained.

Salter envisions unmanned boats spraying sub-micron-sized water droplets into the sky, seeding shinier clouds in areas forecasted to spawn storms.

This would be much cheaper than spraying aerosols from aircraft, the boats could target specific regions, the effects would dissipate quickly and the change in cloud brightness would be imperceptible to the human eye.

He estimated that it would cost $40 million to construct a prototype cloud seeding system but has not been able to find any public or private takers.

“At the moment, the governments are saying its premature, we don’t need it yet,” he added. “Irma might change their minds.”

However, Salter acknowledged the prospect of cloud brightening is just an idea at this point. “Most of the work is done in computers,” he said. …

[watchwolf49]

Perhaps send up some commercial jets full of water, then at altitude slowly release the water through the jet engines … create a huge contrail along the equator and reflect solar energy back out into space …

[Marvin_the_Martian]

The solution is blindingly obvious: kill all the butterflies before they get a chance to flap their wings.

Seriously, if you want to kill off a hurricane using any of the discussed methods it would be cheapest to impact them early in their formation. Maybe weather modeling will get precise enough to determine disturbances likely to cause hurricanes when they are small enough to.do something about.

However, I suspect that killing off all the hurricanes and typhoons will have some significant negative environmental impacts (unintended consequences)…
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[watchwolf49]

We don’t have to model the atmosphere to see where hurricanes are likely to form … we can observe the tropical waves progress across the Atlantic with satellite imagery … any one of which can form a cut-off low and have a tropical cyclone develop … whatever the “something” we do, we’ve only a couple of days to get it done and doing anything out in the middle of the Atlantic of this magnitude may well be impossible … leaving doing this “something” to every tropical wave just to make sure no hurricanes form … and tropical waves aren’t the only initiator of hurricanes …

The immediate unintended consequence is that disrupting hurricane formation will disrupt the energy transfer from the equator to the poles … sea surface temperatures at the equator will rise and make hurricane formation more likely, and these hurricanes will be more powerful … we risk missing getting enough “something” into place and a hurricane forms anyway and/or a profusion of subtropical storms … the energy is going to flow by one mechanic or another …

[SamuelA]

A practical solution :

Autonomous factories. How, you might ask, do autonomous factories solve the problem of hurricanes demolishing vast areas of land?

Simple. The damage, with conventional tech, requires vast amounts of on-site human labor to pay people to remove the flood damaged low quality materials in typical structures, then reinstall new materials, one piece of wood or sheetrock at a time. In addition, most buildings destroyed by wind damage were poorly made composites of plywood and nails and various other weak materials.

What we need is to replace all the destroyed structures with buildings made of tightly constructed networks of aluminum and steel, probably rated for 200 mph winds. They would be elevated or hermetically sealed to stop damage from flooding. Right now, the labor to construct such structures would make them noncompetitive, but if they were made as modules in a factory, fully autonomous, their cost could be below that of conventional construction. The modules that do fail from the next mega-storm could be removed as one piece, then taken back to the factory that made it for disassembly and recycling.

[glowacks]

The best way to stop them at our level of technology is to prevent them from forming by doing something off the coast of West Africa that would break up any Cape Verde tropical wave that might form into a depression. The amount of effort that it might require per wave, and the number of harmless hurricanes and tropical depressions that would end up getting dissipated as well, might mean that it’s not particularly cost-effective to do so compared to just making everything in the path more resistant to hurricanes or just plain leaving the coastal areas. I have no idea how much energy it would take to break up a tropical wave, only that it’s far less than trying to break up a hurricane. They are still general atmospheric events, not localized like tornadoes, so it would be quite an undertaking regardless.

And there’s also possibly unintended consequences to not allowing Cape Verde hurricanes to form, as they manage to move a great deal of energy from near the equator into higher latitudes. It may be that any effort to stop the normal hurricane process off Cape Verde would just create other storms forming elsewhere due to the increase in available energy at those locations since the Cape Verde ones aren’t transporting energy out of the general area.