Contrails to Steer or De-energize Hurricanes

[Harry Anastopoulos]

I have had this theory bouncing around in my head since 9/11 and I would like someone's feedback.

It was a published fact that grounding air traffic in the United States in the days following the 9/11 attacks made a significant measurable impact on North American continental temperatures.  I believe average temperatures rose by over 1 degree Celsius due to the lack of the the artificial "clouds".

What would happen if a country sent a small fleet of aircraft to deliberately create contrails to shield the oceanic waters from sun light leading up to the approach of a hurricane?  I have read that every degree of ocean temperature can make a 10-20 mph difference in hurricane airspeed.  It is also published that cloud cover during the day blocks solar radiation, but cloud cover at night creates a blanketing effect to retain solar heat.  Such a plan would have to retain the contrails during daylight hours and allow them to dissipate during the evening to allow heat to otherwise escape back into the atmosphere.

Couldn't this be a low-cost approach to de-energize a hurricane or also even potentially create a steering effect away from more populated areas?

These comments are not related to the terraforming plans that others have come up with more recently to combat climate change by blocking the sun.  I think about this every time I hear news reports that a storm is expected to strengthen as it hits the warm open waters of the Gulf Of Mexico.

 

 

[swansont]

Aren’t hurricanes driven by the ocean temperature, which is not going to be affected much in the short term by more clouds?

[TheVat]

4 hours ago, Harry Anastopoulos said:

It was a published fact that grounding air traffic in the United States in the days following the 9/11 attacks made a significant measurable impact on North American continental temperatures. 

Fact?  No.  In climatology, short term fluctuations are not much use as data.  The brief temperature rise could have been from other causes.  Contrails do sometimes persist as cirrus clouds, sometimes called cirrus aviaticus, but the research I've seen finds little clearcut effect on overall radiative forcing (climatology lingo for net atmospheric heat gain from trapping outgoing longwave radiation).  

The science is not even there yet on how the radiative forcing might be increased at night by clouds formed by jet condensation nuclei, let alone how nighttime RF balances with daytime cooling.  This paper can give some idea of where the research was going a few years back.

http://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009AtmEn..43.3520L/abstract

A key comment from the abstract:

The lack of physical process models and adequate observational data for aviation-induced cirrus effects limit confidence in quantifying their RF contribution....

 

 

Edited August 7 by TheVat
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