(National Oceanic and Atmospheric…)
Every tropical storm season, when hurricanes threaten, resourceful Americans offer ingenious ideas on how to deflect or destroy them.
Here's one: Dump enough absorbent material, similar to Kitty Litter, into the storm's eye to soak up the warm moisture powering it, and so deflate it.
There's just one problem with this and virtually all of the suggestions that helpful citizens send in to the experts. Hurricanes are just too big and powerful for anything we humans do to have an effect.
Take the Kitty Litter idea. Hurricane expert Hugh Willoughby estimates that it would take at least 100,000 tons, and probably more like 1 million tons, to reduce the force of a Category 5 hurricane.
Just getting a mountain of the stuff to the hurricane's eye would be a logistical nightmare: It'd take more than 1,000 sorties by heavy-lift military air transports, like C-5s, and even then it's doubtful the job would be successful.
"You would basically have to fly constantly for days," said Willoughby, a former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Research Division, who is now a distinguished research professor in the Earth and Environment Department of Florida International University.
All right, so using Kitty Litter-like material is impractical. But scientists also have given due consideration to, and rejected, other hurricane-killing proposals like these:
• Tow an iceberg into the path of a storm, as tropical systems require warm water to flourish. Or, pour supertanker-loads of dry ice into the waters ahead of it.
• Use giant mirrors on orbiting space satellites to redirect sunlight away from the tropics and cool the ocean there. Or, shoot a bunch of opaque carbon into the atmosphere to become a giant awning to achieve the same effect.
• Have submarines set off underwater explosions to suck cooler water to the surface and starve the storms of heat. Or, in the same vein, place giant tubs in a storm's path that would fill with warm water and, via tubes, exchange it for water from the bottom (this was billionaire Bill Gates' idea).
• Float giant fans on barges and flip the "on" switch to blow storms apart.
• Finally, and perhaps the most frequent suggestion: nuke 'em. Scientists say that won't work because while nuclear bombs can destroy structures, their energy would simply pass through a storm's wind field, leaving the eye intact. That's not to mention the nasty side effect that nukes would produce: a hurricane spreading not just wind and rain, but lethal radioactive fallout.
Officials at the National Hurricane Center say they understand why people want to obliterate hurricanes; on average, tropical systems cause more than $5 billion in damage and kill more than 20 people each year in the United States alone. So even if the government needed to spend tens of millions of dollars to weaken a storm, that would be a bargain.
Unfortunately, no matter how "carefully reasoned," none of the concepts are workable in this day and age, said Chris Landsea, hurricane center science and operations officer.
"Perhaps if the time comes when men and women can travel at nearly the speed of light to the stars, we will then have enough energy for brute-force intervention in hurricane dynamics," he said.
Landsea noted that even weak hurricanes are too massive to be "modified" by mere human efforts. As for major hurricanes, their overall strength is nearly unfathomable. Consider Hurricane Andrew, the Category 5 system that struck South Florida 20 years ago in 1992, he said.
"The heat energy released around the eye was 5,000 times the combined heat and electrical power generation of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant," he said. "The kinetic energy of the wind at any instant was equivalent to that released by a nuclear warhead."
Dennis Feltgen, hurricane center spokesman, said there's an "uptick" of hurricane-killing ideas whenever storms threaten to strike the U.S. coast. When Hurricane Irene was approaching the Mid-Atlantic last August, he said, he received about a dozen proposals in four days.
"They're all well intentioned, just not feasible," he said.
Some ideas aren't so outlandish. Willoughby at one time thought placing current-driven pumps on the bottom of the Gulf Stream to drive cold water to the surface might starve storms of their warm-water fuel.
But on reflection, he said, he realized "messing with the Gulf Stream" might alter the Earth's climate patterns and trigger another ice age.
In 2009, Gates supported the idea of placing a series of tubs in the path of a hurricane to funnel tons of cold water to the surface. Considering the idea's originator was the founder of Microsoft, and one of the most successful entrepreneurs and business people of his generation, scientists initially took the concept seriously.