How many drones would it take to stop a hurricane?

[D H]

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".

That article is an oversimplification, and you are oversimplifying even further. There are a huge number problem with your proposal:

• The amount of energy unleashed by a hurricane is huge, and this huge amount of energy is a small fraction of the pent up energy in the oceans. Have you even begun to calculate how much ice you would need?
  
• That disturbance isn't going to wait around for you to drop ice on it. It's moving.. So where are you going to drop this ice?
  
• For every twenty disturbances that come off the Sahara, only one will form into a hurricane. We don't know ahead of time which ones will peter out, which ones will form into Cape Verde hurricanes. Are you going to hit all of those Saharan disturbances, or let some slip through?
  
• Let's assume you are partially successful: You've temporarily stifled the formation of a major hurricane. That disturbance is still there, however, and it's moving. When that disturbance moves over a nice warm batch of water it forms into a major hurricane, and it's now your hurricane. Hurricane Bill Angel. By disturbing the initial formation, you just bought that new hurricane, and you bought all of the destruction it will wreak. You better have lots of money to fend off all of the lawsuits that will result.
  
• Let's assume you are completely successful: You iced the ocean all along the path of that disturbance. You've just ruined the Atlantic fishing industry. Once again, you better have lots of money to fend off all of the lawsuits that will result.
  
• That's just the Cape Verde hurricanes. Some form in the Caribbean, some in the Gulf. You need even more ice. If you're successful, you'll have shut down the Gulf Stream -- and you may well have triggered the next ice age.
  
• Even with all of the ice you dump (and you can't do it), you haven't solved the root cause of hurricanes. The root cause is the huge energy difference between the tropics and the poles. Your ice is not going to change that one bit.

 

There isn't enough energy in the world to produce the amount of ice needed for this venture, and even if there was, the havoc it would wreak would be worse than the problem you are trying to cure.

[John Cuthber]

Many Atlantic creatures prefer their water salty. Please don't add that much fresh water (as ice).

[Bill Angel]

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

Actually, where the ice is stored is of secondary importance, as the technology exists to move huge amounts of cold materials about the globe via ocean going tankers.

For example, in recent years the size and capacity of LNG ( liquified natural gas ) carriers has increased greatly. Modern LNG carriers have a cargo capacity of between 210,000 and 266,000 cubic meters and are equipped with re-liquefaction plants. So ships could be used to move the ice to sites of probable hurricane formation, where the ice would then be reloaded onto the airborne drones.

Edited November 14, 2012 by Bill Angel

[John Cuthber]

So to ship 600,000,000,000 cubic metres of ice would only need about 3 million ships for each hurricane.

And one of these

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-225

can shift something like 250 tonnes so you only need about 2 billion of them (converted for drone operation obviously, or you would need to train a third of the world's population as pilots and I don't think you could find enough people for the co pilot and other crew)

 

 

Interestingly, the fuel capacity of that plane is about the same as it's carrying capacity so they would need roughly half a trillion tonnes of fuel.

That's something like 3 trillion barrels of oil (for each of about half a dozen big hurricanes so 18,000,000,000,000 barrels in total)

The world production is about 100 million barrels a day or 30 billion barrels a year so you just need to raise oil production rates by a factor of a thousand fold or so.

 

Well, I'm surprised that nobody has done it before.

What were they waiting for?

 

(BTW, if I have misplaced the odd factor of a thousand I don't care)

[Bill Angel]

That article is an oversimplification, and you are oversimplifying even further. There are a huge number problem with your proposal:

• The amount of energy unleashed by a hurricane is huge, and this huge amount of energy is a small fraction of the pent up energy in the oceans. Have you even begun to calculate how much ice you would need?
  
• That disturbance isn't going to wait around for you to drop ice on it. It's moving.. So where are you going to drop this ice?
  
• For every twenty disturbances that come off the Sahara, only one will form into a hurricane. We don't know ahead of time which ones will peter out, which ones will form into Cape Verde hurricanes. Are you going to hit all of those Saharan disturbances, or let some slip through?
  
• Let's assume you are partially successful: You've temporarily stifled the formation of a major hurricane. That disturbance is still there, however, and it's moving. When that disturbance moves over a nice warm batch of water it forms into a major hurricane, and it's now your hurricane. Hurricane Bill Angel. By disturbing the initial formation, you just bought that new hurricane, and you bought all of the destruction it will wreak. You better have lots of money to fend off all of the lawsuits that will result.
  
• Let's assume you are completely successful: You iced the ocean all along the path of that disturbance. You've just ruined the Atlantic fishing industry. Once again, you better have lots of money to fend off all of the lawsuits that will result.
  
• That's just the Cape Verde hurricanes. Some form in the Caribbean, some in the Gulf. You need even more ice. If you're successful, you'll have shut down the Gulf Stream -- and you may well have triggered the next ice age.
  
• Even with all of the ice you dump (and you can't do it), you haven't solved the root cause of hurricanes. The root cause is the huge energy difference between the tropics and the poles. Your ice is not going to change that one bit.

 

There isn't enough energy in the world to produce the amount of ice needed for this venture, and even if there was, the havoc it would wreak would be worse than the problem you are trying to cure.

 

Deferring a discussion of the legal and practical issues that you raised, I would address the scientific questions that you mentioned.

I am encouraged to believe that scientists will get a handle on solving them through better mathematical models of how the atmosphere behaves.

A good article discussing this issue is Tomorrow's weather: Cloudy, with a chance of fractals

To quote from that article:

Today's computer models represent the atmosphere as a vast grid-like pattern of cells, whose

meteorological properties are calculated using the complex equations formulated by Richardson and

his successors. The finer the grid, the better the simulation, but even the world's fastest

supercomputers can't cope when the grid is made up of cells smaller than about 100 square

kilometres.

To get around the problem, modellers have come up with estimates of what happens inside the cells,

called parameterisations. The problem with such parameterisations is that they can fall victim to the

notorious butterfly effect, by which even small inaccuracies in the initial conditions can be magnified to

huge size by the non-linear nature of the processes underlying the weather. This can lead to

unreliable forecasts.

McKenna believes that the discovery of scaling laws could transform the situation by providing insights

into phenomena that take place on scales smaller than 100 kilometres. Robin Hogan of the University

of Reading, UK, agrees that they could be a big improvement on existing techniques. "Although we

won't know what individual eddies are doing at this sub-grid scale, their net ability to, say, transport

heat vertically could be estimated," he says.

 

If computer models become good enough to estimate the vertical transport of heat in a tropical storm, then it should be possible to estimate how much ice would be needed to suppress this vertical transport and therefore suppress the formation of a hurricane. The section in the original article that I quoted is, I believe, relevant to this:

 

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.

 

There is another good explaination of this in the article How do hurricanes form?

This article has a diagram showing the movement of warm moist air in the center of the storm (represented as red arrows). So the question is, how much ice would be needed to be added to suppress the flow of that warm moist air up the tropical storm's "chimney"?

[InigoMontoya]

So the question is, how much ice would be needed to be added to suppress the flow of that warm moist air up the tropical storm's "chimney"?

 

You just don't seem to be grasping the size of the problem. Using the prior analysis as a template....

 

Google sayeth that a typical thunderstorm releases approximately 10e15 Joules of energy. Mind you, we're talking about a garden variety thunderstorm and not a full on tropical storm. But hey, you don't seem to be grasping the scope of the problem so we'll roll with it....

 

I recall that it takes 333.6 kJ to melt a kg of ice.

 

1*10^15 / 333.6*10^3 = 3*10^9 kg of ice required. Or would you prefer to see it written as 3,000,000 metric tons of ice?

 

That's definitely better than the hurricane, but it would still require 44,000 Boeing 747s to haul your ice load... Which is only about 30X as many 747s as has ever been built.

 

Remember, this is for a storm system way smaller than anything that resembles a named storm.

 

How many such storms do we have per year? We made it to Sandy this year so that's 18...

 

 

I say again: You do not seem to grasp the scale of the problem.

Edited November 15, 2012 by InigoMontoya

[John Cuthber]

So the question is, how much ice would be needed to be added to suppress the flow of that warm moist air up the tropical storm's "chimney"?

Lots.

But, if you read the thread, you already knew that.

So why are you asking again? Are you hoping that reality will change to accommodate your preference?

[Bill Angel]

Lots.

But, if you read the thread, you already knew that.

So why are you asking again? Are you hoping that reality will change to accommodate your preference?

Well, if my idea is looney, I'm in interesting company.

There is an article titled How To Stop A Hurricane: 4 Strange Theories On How To Subdue A Natural Disaster

The article mentions an idea by Bill Gates and his associates that involves pumping huge quantities of chilly water into the eye of hurricane which will purportedly make the storm fizzle out. I don't know if his idea is more practical than mine, but I think that the two ideas have a theoretical similarity.

[InigoMontoya]

Well, if my idea is looney, I'm in interesting company.

There is an article titled How To Stop A Hurricane: 4 Strange Theories On How To Subdue A Natural Disaster

The article mentions an idea by Bill Gates and his associates that involves pumping huge quantities of chilly water into the eye of hurricane which will purportedly make the storm fizzle out. I don't know if his idea is more practical than mine, but I think that the two ideas have a theoretical similarity.

 

And yet, with all those Billions at his disposal, Gates has done nothing to make the scheme a reality. 'Just cause the simulations say it will work - and I've no doubt it would if you could get the resources - doesn't mean it's actually doable. Why isn't it doable? Because you can't get the resources. They simply do not exist.

[Bill Angel]

And yet, with all those Billions at his disposal, Gates has done nothing to make the scheme a reality. 'Just cause the simulations say it will work - and I've no doubt it would if you could get the resources - doesn't mean it's actually doable. Why isn't it doable? Because you can't get the resources. They simply do not exist.

Hurricane modification doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. Project Stormfury  was an attempt to weaken tropical cyclones  by flying aircraft into them and seeding them  with silver iodide . The project was run by the United States Government from 1962 to 1983. While the project was not succesful, even a small reduction in the speed of a hurricane's winds would be beneficial; as the damage potential of a hurricane increases as the square of the wind speed. A slight lowering of wind speed would have a large reduction in destructiveness.

[InigoMontoya]

[nevermind]

Edited November 16, 2012 by InigoMontoya

[John Cuthber]

So, you know the government gave up on it. You know that Gates and his friends didn't even start.

And you still think it's sensible.

Why?

 

Also, as has been pointed out, modification of a hurricane is legal suicide.

[Bill Angel]

So, you know the government gave up on it. You know that Gates and his friends didn't even start.

And you still think it's sensible.

Why?

 

Also, as has been pointed out, modification of a hurricane is legal suicide.

 

There is interesting information at the National Weather Service's National Hurricane Website, in particular about the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. I don't think that it would be "legal suicide" if the Government developed and implemented methods that reduced a category 2 hurricane to a category 1 hurricane, which also is a much less ambitious goal than attempting to extinguish the force of a category 5 hurricane. Also, a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that a more complete understanding of the physical processes taking place in hurricanes was needed before any additional modification experiments should be conducted.

[Myuncle]

Actually, where the ice is stored is of secondary importance, as the technology exists to move huge amounts of cold materials about the globe via ocean going tankers.

For example, in recent years the size and capacity of LNG ( liquified natural gas ) carriers has increased greatly. Modern LNG carriers have a cargo capacity of between 210,000 and 266,000 cubic meters and are equipped with re-liquefaction plants. So ships could be used to move the ice to sites of probable hurricane formation, where the ice would then be reloaded onto the airborne drones.

 

 

And also no fresh water is needed, they could use salty water in the South Pole

[John Cuthber]

1 I don't think that it would be "legal suicide" if the Government developed and implemented methods that reduced a category 2 hurricane to a category 1 hurricane, which also is a much less ambitious goal than attempting to extinguish the force of a category 5 hurricane.

 

2 Also, a special committee of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that a more complete understanding of the physical processes taking place in hurricanes was needed before any additional modification experiments should be conducted.

 

Re 1

It has already been explained to you but here we go again.

If you mess about with the storm then you are bound to change it's path.

So if it hits and kills someone you are liable for their death.

 

Re 2

So, yet another group has said that we can't do it, but you still keep on thinking it's a good idea.

Why?

[Bill Angel]

Re 1

It has already been explained to you but here we go again.

If you mess about with the storm then you are bound to change it's path.

So if it hits and kills someone you are liable for their death.

What you are asserting sounds reasonable, but ignores the fact that the federal government possesses “sovereign immunity".

"In the United States , the federal government  has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit".

I would presume that a plaintiff's only grounds for being able to sue the government for modifying the path of a hurricane would be negligence i.e. that the government performed the task badly.

[InigoMontoya]

What you are asserting sounds reasonable, but ignores the fact that the federal government possesses “sovereign immunity".

"In the United States , the federal government  has sovereign immunity and may not be sued unless it has waived its immunity or consented to suit".

I would presume that a plaintiff's only grounds for being able to sue the government for modifying the path of a hurricane would be negligence i.e. that the government performed the task badly.

And given that it would be a new art, there WOULD be instances of performing the task badly.

[John Cuthber]

In addition to the risk of getting sued, anyone who was involved in the work would be an accessory to murder.

The government might have immunity, but the individuals wouldn't.