Can we stop hurricanes?

[This is a transcript of the video embedded below.]


Hurricanes are among the most devastating natural disasters. That’s because hurricanes are enormous! A medium-sized hurricane extends over an area about the size of Texas. On a globe they’ll cover 6 to 12 degrees latitude. And as they blow over land, they leave behind wide trails of destruction, caused by strong winds and rain. Damages from hurricanes regularly exceed billions of US dollars. Can’t we do something about that? Can’t we blast hurricanes apart? Redirect them? Or stop them from forming in the first place? What does science say about that? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, has reportedly asked repeatedly whether it’s possible to get rid of hurricanes by dropping nuclear bombs on them. His proposal was swiftly dismissed by scientists and the media likewise. Their argument can be summed up with “you can’t” and even if you could “it’d be a bad idea.” Trump then denied he ever said anything, the world forgot about it, and here we are, still wondering if not there’s something we can do to stop hurricanes.

Trumps idea might sound crazy, but he was not the first to think of nuking a hurricane, and he probably won’t be the last. And I think trying to prevent hurricanes isn’t as crazy as it sounds.

The idea to nuke a hurricane came up already right after nuclear weapons were deployed for the first time, in Japan in August 1945. August is in the middle of the hurricane season in Florida. The mayor of Miami Beach, Herbert Frink, made the connection. He asked President Harry Truman about the possibility to use the new weapon to fight against hurricanes. And, sure enough, the Americans looked into it.

But they quickly realized that while the energy released by a nuclear bomb was gigantic compared to all other kinds of weapons, it was still nothing compared to the energies that build up in hurricanes. For comparison: The atomic bombs dropped on Japan released an energy of about 20 kilotons each. A typical hurricane releases about 10,000 times as much energy – per hour. The total power of a hurricane is comparable to the entire global power consumption. That’s because hurricanes are enormous!

By the way, hurricanes and typhoons are the same thing. The generic term used by meterologists is “tropical cyclone”. It refers to “a rotating, organized system of clouds and thunderstorms that originates over tropical or subtropical waters.” If they get large enough, they’re then either called hurricanes or typhoons, or they just remain tropical cyclones. But it’s like the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut. The same thing!

But back to the nukes. In 1956 an Air Force meteorologist by name Jack W Reed proposed to launch a megaton nuclear bomb – that is about 50 times the power of the ones in Japan – into a hurricane. Just to see what happened. He argued: “Since a complete theory for the dynamics of hurricanes will probably not be derived by meteorologists for several years, argument pros and con without conclusive foundation will be made over the effects to be expected… Only a full-scale test could prove the results.” In other words, if we don’t do it, we’ll never know just how bad the idea is. For what the radiation hazard was concerned, Reed claimed it would be negligible: “An airburst would cause no intense fallout,” never mind that a complete theory for the dynamics of hurricanes wasn’t available then and still isn’t.

Reed’s proposal was dismissed by both the military and the scientific community. The test never took place, but the proposal is interesting nevertheless, because Reed went to some length to explain how to go about nuking a hurricane smartly.

To understand what he was trying to get at, let’s briefly talk about how hurricanes form. Hurricanes can form over the ocean when the water temperature is high enough. Trouble begins at around 26 degrees Celsius or 80 degrees Fahrenheit. The warm water evaporates and rises. As it rises it cools and creates clouds. This tower of water-heavy clouds begins to spin because the Coriolis force, which comes from the rotation of planet Earth, acts on the air that’s drawn in, and the more the clouds spin, the better they get at drawing in more air. As the spinning accelerates, the center of the hurricane clears out and leaves behind a mostly calm region that’s usually a few dozen miles in diameter and has very low barometric pressure. This calm center is called the “eye” of the hurricane.

Reed now argued that if one detonates a megaton nuclear weapon directly in the eye of a hurricane, this would blast away the warm air that feeds the cycle, increase the barometric pressure, and prevent the storm from gathering more strength.

Now, the obvious problem with this idea is that even if you succeeded, you’d deposit radioactive debris in clouds that you just blasted all over the globe, congratulations. But even leaving aside the little issue with the radioactivity, it almost certainly wouldn’t work because - hurricanes are enormous.

It’s not only that you’re still up against a power that exceeds that of your nuclear bomb by three orders of magnitude, it’s also that an explosion doesn’t actually move a lot of air from one place to another, which is what Reed envisioned. The blast creates a shock wave – that’s bad news for everything in the way of that shock – but it does little to change the barometric pressure after the shock wave has passed through.

So if nuclear bombs are not the way to deal with hurricanes, can we maybe make them rain off before they make landfall? This technique is called “cloud seeding” and we talked about this in a previous video. If you remember, there are two types of cloud seeding, one that creates snow or ice, and one that creates rain.

The first one, called glaciogenic seeding was indeed tried on hurricanes by Homer Simpson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMVKksxZgwU No, not this Homer, but a man by name Robert Homer Simpson, who in 1962 was the first director of the American Project Stormfury, which had the goal of weakening hurricanes.

The Americans actually *did spray a hurricane with silver iodide and observed afterwards that the hurricane indeed weakened. Hooray! But wait. Further research showed that hurricane clouds contain very little supercooled water droplets, so the method couldn’t work even in theory. Instead, it turned out that hurricanes frequently undergo similar changes without intervention, so the observation was most likely coincidence. Project Stormfury was canceled in 1983.

What about hygroscopic cloud seeding, which works by spraying clouds with particles that absorb water, to make the clouds rain off? The effects of this have been studied to some extent by observing natural phenomena. For example, dust that’s blown up over the Sahara Desert can be transported by winds over long distances. Though much remains to be understood, some observations seem to indicate that interactions with this dust makes it easier for the clouds to rain off, which naturally weaken hurricanes.

So why don’t we try something similar? Again, the problem is that hurricanes are enormous! You’d need a whole army of airplanes to spray the clouds, and even then that would almost certainly not make the hurricanes disappear, but merely weaken them.

There’s a long list of other things people have considered to get rid of hurricanes. For example, spraying the upper layers of a hurricane with particles that absorb sunlight to warm up the air, and thereby reduce the updraft. But again, the problem is that hurricanes are enormous! Keep in mind, you’d have to spray an area about the size of Texas.

A similar idea is to prevent the air above the ocean from evaporating and feeding the growth of the hurricane, for example by covering the ocean surface with oil films. The obvious problem with this idea is that, well, now you have all that oil on the ocean. But also, some small-scale experiments have shown that the oil-cover tends to break up, and where it doesn’t break up, it can actually aid the warming of the water, which is exactly what you don’t want.

How about we cool the ocean surface instead? This idea has been pursued for example by Bill Gates, who, in 2009, together with a group of scientists and entrepreneurs patented a pump system that would float in the ocean and pump cool water from deep down to the surface. In 2017 the Norwegian company SINTEF put forward a similar proposal. The problem with this idea is, guess what, hurricanes are enormous! You’d have to get a huge number of these pumps in the right place at the right time.

Another seemingly popular idea is to drag icebergs from the poles to the tropics to cool the water. I leave it to you to figure out the logistics for making this happen.

Yet again other people have argued that one doesn’t actually have to blow apart a hurricane to get rid of it, one merely has to detonate a nuclear bomb strategically so that the hurricane changes direction. The problem with this idea is that no one wants multiple nations to play nuclear billiard on the oceans.

As you have seen, there are lots of ideas, but the key problem is that hurricanes are enormous!

And that means the most promising way to prevent them is to intervene before they get too large. Hurricanes don’t suddenly pop out of nowhere, they take several days to form and usually arise from storms in the tropics which also don’t pop out of nowhere.

What the problem then comes down to is that meteorologists can’t presently predict well enough and not long enough in advance just which regions will go on to form hurricanes. But, as you have seen, researchers have tried quite a few methods to interfere with the feedback cycle that grows hurricanes, and some of them actually work. So, if we could tell just when and where to interfere, that might actually make a difference.

My conclusion therefore is: If you want to prevent hurricanes, you don’t need larger bombs, you need to invest into better weather forecasts.