How many drones would it take to stop a hurricane?

[Myuncle]

The drones together transport a huge sheet of plastic or plywood in the middle of the hurricane, is it possible?

Edited November 12, 2012 by Myuncle

[Bill Angel]

The drones together transport a huge sheet of plastic or plywood in the middle of the hurricane, is it possible?

I don't understand how a huge sheet of plastic or plywood would dissipate the power of a hurricane. But I like your idea about using drones.

 

One wonders if it would be possible to use cloud seeding techniques out at sea to dissipate or at least reduce the destructive power of a hurricane. One source of information on cloud seeding is this article:

http://www.lightwatcher.com/chemtrails/cloud_seeding.html

If the clouds were seeded early enough over the ocean, would the hurricane even form? One could use drones to perform the seeding.

[CaptainPanic]

Hurricanes, as well as every other type of weather are just ways for our planet to dissipate heat. If you're gonna kill the hurricane that is about to hit the USA, could you be so kind to at least guarantee that it will not screw up the weather elsewhere?

 

Because I am living elsewhere.

[Myuncle]

Hurricanes, as well as every other type of weather are just ways for our planet to dissipate heat. If you're gonna kill the hurricane that is about to hit the USA, could you be so kind to at least guarantee that it will not screw up the weather elsewhere?

 

Because I am living elsewhere.

 

Yes, it's important what you say, the weather it's already screwd up, we have to do something, doing nothing it's not an option anymore.

 

I don't understand how a huge sheet of plastic or plywood would dissipate the power of a hurricane. But I like your idea about using drones.

Since we can't nuke a hurricane with an atom bomb I was thinking about kilometres of sheet suspended in the air by lots of drones.

[Moontanman]

Yes, it's important what you say, the weather it's already screwd up, we have to do something, doing nothing it's not an option anymore.

 

 

Since we can't nuke a hurricane with an atom bomb I was thinking about kilometres of sheet suspended in the air by lots of drones.

 

 

We could nuke a hurricane, we could nuke one many times if we wanted, wouldn't do any good, make the rain radioactive... Understanding the power of a hurricane is difficult if you've never been through one, something like the power of a megaton class bomb going off very nearly continuously if my memory serves me, in fact introducing the extra heat energy would almost certainly only make it worse, we might be influencing the weather but it has taken centuries to do so and it was by mistake, intentionally doing it might take centuries as well, removing the extra CO2 we've already added almost certainly will...

[D H]

the weather it's already screwd up, we have to do something, doing nothing it's not an option anymore.

The weather has always been screwed up. That the extremes in weather are partially our fault is looking more and more to be the case. Whether something can be done about it is an issue. Whether fighting fire with fire is the right solution is an even bigger issue. So what are the options?

 

One is to do nothing. Doing nothing is always an option. Another is adaptation. Move people away from the immediate coasts, do a better job of preparing for and handling emergencies. Mitigation is yet another, but this will take quite a bit of time to take effect. The CO₂ problem took a long time to create, and it's going to take an even longer time to cure. We'll have to deal with it (do nothing or adapt) while the climate recovers from the damage done to it over the decades. Climate intervention is arguably the most dangerous route, even worse doing nothing.

[Myuncle]

Doing nothing is always an option.

 

It's always an option, but is it worth it now? Tropical deforestation is responsible for approximately 20% of world greenhouse gas emissions, 35% of harvested trees are used for paper manufacture. Can't we give up all the paper at all? Or a few nostalgic will complain about e-books and how good were the "old days" when they could read a book in real paper?

[Dekan]

Yes, it's important what you say, the weather it's already screwd up, we have to do something, doing nothing it's not an option anymore.

 

 

Since we can't nuke a hurricane with an atom bomb I was thinking about kilometres of sheet suspended in the air by lots of drones.

 

Couldn't the USA build a chain of enormous wind-turbines all along its East Coast. There's enough space for at least 5,000 of them. Each with three 100-metre blades. These huge rotating triple-blades would generate a colossal amount of electric current.

 

Plus - they'd soak up the wind energy from incoming hurricanes, and smooth it out - thus transforming wildly rushing air currents into a source of steady power, and US consumer satisfaction. Moreover, the wind-turbines could be coated in re-cycled aluminium foil. This would reflect the hot solar rays back into outer space, and so help reduce Global Warming! And turbine-chains on the Pacific Coast too, would generate a lot of useful power, and reflect more sunlight away.

 

With all these advantages and benefits, what's stopping the USA from doing it?

[D H]

With all these advantages and benefits, what's stopping the USA from doing it?

What advantages and benefits? Wind turbines are locked in place during hurricanes and other high wind events. The blades do not spin. The turbine as a whole however needs to yaw with the wind to prevent damage to the tower. This takes power. Wind turbines during a hurricane are not an energy source. They are an energy sink.

[zapatos]

... 35% of harvested trees are used for paper manufacture.

Maybe so, but is that really a problem?

 

What percentagoe of those trees are grown as a crop for the purpose of making paper pulp? If the tree is grown as a crop then harvesting it is no more damaging than harvesting sweet corn. CO2 is simply recycled.

 

Since reforestation is common in much of the world where non-crop trees are harvested for paper pulp, what is the net loss of biomass due to harvesting trees for paper manufacture?

 

Simply pointing out that 35% of harvested trees are used for paper manufacture gives us no indiation that a problem even exists, much less what the extent of the problem may be.

[John Cuthber]

Why is it that people just don't realise how powerful a hurricane is?

I'm lucky: I haven't seen one but a spot of googling tells me that they dissipate something like 10^12 Watts of wind power and something like 10^15 Watts total.

 

That's something like 200 times the total installed power rating of all the generating kit on the planet.

Say that we were foolish enough to install 5000 wind turbines and, to be even more absurd, lets imagine that the hurricane obligingly spreads itself along the whole coast (rather than turning up in one place and trashing it.)

10^15 Watts divided by 5000 turbines is about 10^11 Watts each.

The biggest wind turbines in the world are rated for about 10^7 Watts

So each one would be overloaded by a factor of something like 10,000. How long do you think they would last?

 

The recent hurricane destroyed kilometres of concrete and steel as it rampaged through a city.

What do you think a kilometre sheet of anything would do apart from contribute to the clean-up costs?

 

 

Seriously, there's only 1 way to avoid hurricane damage.

 

Get out of the way.

[InigoMontoya]

I seem to recall reading an article a few years back wherein the idea was discussed that it was technically feasible to steer a hurricane via selective cloud seeding. No, you couldn't stop it or reduce it's impact, but you could get it to hit an uninhabited stretch of beech 100 miles to the East rather than New Orleans. HOWEVER....

 

....No one will endeavor to do such because there is no such thing as "uninhabited". If you cause the hurricane to hit a comparatively uninhabited area that it would not have otherwise hit and someone dies... Congratulations, the family has the grounds for one hell of a lawsuit. After all, you took action to knowingly steer a hurricane in their direction that resulted in the deaths of their loved ones.

 

Alternatively, what happens if you try to steer a hurricane, things go badly, and you have it pull a Sandy/Katrina?

 

In short, the lawyers would have an absolute field day.

 

Thus, nobody with any sense wants to get into that game. It's just not worth it from a personal liability perspective.

 

 

 

 

As an aside: I want to see the 500 mile wide sheet of plywood. It wouldn't stop a hurricane, but it sure would be a sight!

Edited November 12, 2012 by InigoMontoya

[Rotunda]

Hurricanes are very large cyclones of hot and cold air (high and low pressures) spinning in a circle pulling water up where it's heat is then dispersed, adding to the problem. If so, stabilizing the pressures would prevent the storm from starting. It isn't that far fetched to propose a small army of drones carry liquid oxygen to the high heat (thus high pressure) region and releasing it, is it? After all, if the storms are natural heat dispersion, don't we have the option to balance the heat manually?

[Bill Angel]

Hurricanes are very large cyclones of hot and cold air (high and low pressures) spinning in a circle pulling water up where it's heat is then dispersed, adding to the problem. If so, stabilizing the pressures would prevent the storm from starting. It isn't that far fetched to propose a small army of drones carry liquid oxygen to the high heat (thus high pressure) region and releasing it, is it? After all, if the storms are natural heat dispersion, don't we have the option to balance the heat manually?

I should think that drones carrying ice crystals to disperse in areas of warm air would do a better job cooling those areas than would be accomplished by drones carrying liquid oxygen.

[John Cuthber]

So, now all you have to do is calculate how much ice they need.

 

Then you can realise that the only way to deal with a hurricane is to get out of the way.

[InigoMontoya]

So, now all you have to do is calculate how much ice they need.

 

Not only that, but to create all that ice, you've to release a crapload of heat somewhere else... Which is no doubt going to come with it's own "unintended consequences."

[John Cuthber]

Not only that, but to create all that ice, you've to release a crapload of heat somewhere else... Which is no doubt going to come with it's own "unintended consequences."

Once they see the price of making the ice they won't bother.

BTW, making ice doesn't just dump heat, it takes energy too, so with the current energy supply it generates a whole lot of CO2 to add to the energy of the storms in the first place.

 

Or, you can move out of the way.

[Fuzzwood]

Not only that, but to create all that ice, you've to release a crapload of heat somewhere else... Which is no doubt going to come with it's own "unintended consequences."

 

For instance, a hurricane... oh wait.

[D H]

If so, stabilizing the pressures would prevent the storm from starting.

No. Which system, to start with? For every twenty or so low pressure systems that form across the Sahara, only one will become a hurricane. Then there are hurricanes such as Sandy that aren't Cape Verde type hurricanes.

 

It isn't that far fetched to propose a small army of drones carry liquid oxygen to the high heat (thus high pressure) region and releasing it, is it? After all, if the storms are natural heat dispersion, don't we have the option to balance the heat manually?

Yes, it is incredibly far fetched. The energy released by a typical hurricane (not a strong one) in a single day is greater than the amount of electrical energy produced in the US in an entire year. You are asking a French bulldog to stop a car.

 

Now what if you use a pack of 1000 French bulldogs to stop that car? What then? You might steer the storm into some other area. With people. Insurance companies will sue you, big time. If you are very unlucky you might even stop the storm. This will keep the energy bottled up -- until the next time around that is, when the storm that arises makes a category 5 storm look like child's play. Good luck with the lawsuits that result from that.

 

 

Then you can realise that the only way to deal with a hurricane is to get out of the way.

There's quite a bit more that one can do. Friends on the east coast have sent me lots of pictures of the devastation from Sandy. A lot of that devastation was preventable. Too many of the trees that fell were rotten, and too many of those that were otherwise healthy had way too many branches. People in hurricane prone areas hire tree surgeons to take down unhealthy trees and to prune the healthy trees so the wind blows through them rather than blowing them down. Too many roofs came down because they were poorly built. Shingles at 80 mph wind are deadly weapons that can take down otherwise viable structures. The rules and regulations on home construction and home improvements where I live (20 miles from the Gulf coast) are extremely onerous. My new picture window on the south side of my house is almost bulletproof. Too many of the houses in New York and New Jersey have their electrical service in the basements. That's just ridiculous.

[swansont]

There's quite a bit more that one can do. Friends on the east coast have sent me lots of pictures of the devastation from Sandy. A lot of that devastation was preventable. Too many of the trees that fell were rotten, and too many of those that were otherwise healthy had way too many branches. People in hurricane prone areas hire tree surgeons to take down unhealthy trees and to prune the healthy trees so the wind blows through them rather than blowing them down. Too many roofs came down because they were poorly built. Shingles at 80 mph wind are deadly weapons that can take down otherwise viable structures. The rules and regulations on home construction and home improvements where I live (20 miles from the Gulf coast) are extremely onerous. My new picture window on the south side of my house is almost bulletproof. Too many of the houses in New York and New Jersey have their electrical service in the basements. That's just ridiculous.

Ridiculous perhaps, but understandable. You come up with building codes and undertake preparations that seem reasonable for the risks you have. e.g. in the DC area we don't build to California's earthquake code for the same reason, and because of that, when we got a 5.9 quake it caused some damage, while in California it would have been no big deal. We also don't get a tremendous amount of snow, so we don't have a large fleet of snowplows. Same for you, I would assume, being close to the gulf coast. It's a matter of the expense you can justify, given the risk.

 

Now, of course, with two years in a row of a hurricane making it up the coast, and the prospect that this is not a once-a-century (or even once-a-generation) event it might be a lot easier to demand better building codes. I suspect the insurance industry would lobby for them.

[Moontanman]

I live in a hurricane prone area as well, we plan ahead, trees are trimmed away from power lines, houses are built to hurricane codes, basements are rare, only along the actual coast, houses in the surf type deals do you see much damage from all but the most powerful storms.

 

I've been through a cat 3 storm, two hurricanes with in six weeks of each other, they do great damage but here it's rare to get a death, evacuation centers are all over the place, escape routs plainly marked on all highways...

 

The eye of a hurricane is an awesome sight to behold from ground level, it looks like you are inside some Brobdingnagian barrel made of black clouds... I've seen several from that perspective... Tornadoes spawned by the hurricane do most of the damage to structures here or storm surge along the water.

[Bill Angel]

Not only that, but to create all that ice, you've to release a crapload of heat somewhere else... Which is no doubt going to come with it's own "unintended consequences."

Perhaps. Ice could be stockpiled in the winter in ice houses, having been created naturally by the cold weather. That way there would not be any heat dumped into the atmosphere by creating the ice via some artificial refrigeration process.

[InigoMontoya]

Ice could be stockpiled in the winter in ice houses,

 

Have you bothered to calculate how much ice we're talking about yet?

 

 

 

 

edit: OK, I'm bored....

 

A quick google tells me that the average hurricane releases 52*10^18 J of energy per day (most of which is released as heat when water condenses). If I say that the hurricane lasts 7 days, that's 364*10^18 J of energy that we need to absorb. Ah, heck... We'll be nice and assume that you only need to absorb HALF of that to prevent the hurricane (let it just stay a tropical storm). OK, so we need to absorb 182*10^18 J of heat energy.

 

Another quick google tells me that it takes 333.6 kJ to melt a kg of ice.

 

182*10^18 / 333.6*10^3 = 545*10^12 kg of ice required. Or would you prefer to see it written as 545,000,000,000 metric tons of ice?

 

A cubic meter of ice weighs in at roughly 900 kg. Thus, we're talking about 606*10^9 cubic meters of ice.

 

For comparisons sake, that's only 242,000 times the volume of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Or if you prefer, a slab of ice 10 meters thick and 278 km in diameter.

 

All that to stop ONE hurricane. What do we have... half a dozen hurricanes per year?

 

 

So tell me.... Who's back yard did you want to put this ice house in?

Edited November 14, 2012 by InigoMontoya

[Bill Angel]

Have you bothered to calculate how much ice we're talking about yet?

 

 

 

 

edit: OK, I'm bored....

 

A quick google tells me that the average hurricane releases 52*10^18 J of energy per day (most of which is released as heat when water condenses). If I say that the hurricane lasts 7 days, that's 364*10^18 J of energy that we need to absorb. Ah, heck... We'll be nice and assume that you only need to absorb HALF of that to prevent the hurricane (let it just stay a tropical storm). OK, so we need to absorb 182*10^18 J of heat energy.

 

Another quick google tells me that it takes 333.6 kJ to melt a kg of ice.

 

182*10^18 / 333.6*10^3 = 545*10^12 kg of ice required. Or would you prefer to see it written as 545,000,000,000 metric tons of ice?

 

A cubic meter of ice weighs in at roughly 900 kg. Thus, we're talking about 606*10^9 cubic meters of ice.

 

For comparisons sake, that's only 242,000 times the volume of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Or if you prefer, a slab of ice 10 meters thick and 278 km in diameter.

 

All that to stop ONE hurricane. What do we have... half a dozen hurricanes per year?

 

 

So tell me.... Who's back yard did you want to put this ice house in?

I was thinking more along the lines of using the ice to disrupt the formation of the hurricane.

This article discusses how hurricanes form

In the beginning, a disturbance forms in the atmosphere, developing into an area of low atmospheric pressure. Winds begin to move into the center of the storm seedling from surrounding areas of higher air pressure. Warm water heats the air, and it rises as it nears the center. The ocean feeds warmth and moisture into the developing storm, providing energy that causes the warm air in the center to rise faster. It condenses high in the atmosphere, creating thunderstorms. If conditions are favorable, a tropical depression develops into a tropical storm, then finally into a hurricane, which is not unlike a giant swirling mass of thunderstorms. As rising air in the storm's center condenses, it produces heat, forcing it to rise even faster. The air is pushed out the top -- much like smoke out the chimney of a fire -- and more air has to rush in at the surface to take its place. This kicks the ocean up more and, well, you can see that the storm essentially feeds on itself.

See Article :How & Where Hurricanes Form

So the idea is to utilize the ice to keep the storm from feeding upon itself by supressing the "chimney effect".

[zapatos]

I was thinking more along the lines of using the ice to disrupt the formation of the hurricane.

This article discusses how hurricanes form

 

See Article :How & Where Hurricanes Form

So the idea is to utilize the ice to keep the storm from feeding upon itself by supressing the "chimney effect".

So then you want to store the ice in the tropics?