A nuclear bomb just might be big enough.
I have not seen any numbers for the energy of a tornado, but a good sized thunderstorm has the energy of a large nuclear weapon.
The “cure” would be worse than the “disease”.
I think the fact that they can’t be predicted with enough accuracy would make preventing them pretty tough.
Better shelters are probably the way to go.
Most tornadoes last only minutes. Very few touch the ground or cause serious damage. I would think that the kind of explosive that you are imagining would be more dangerous than the tornado.
Always wondered about that myself.
My idea is to drop tons of ice into it, to cool the temps and rob it of energy. /s
Supposing the warhead yield was large enough to disrupt the vortex, it would only last for a few seconds. The funnel would likely resume again. You’re fighting against atmospheric currents... There’s a reason no one has developed anything to dissipate one yet.
I saw a waterspout come apart when it hit a mountain. The problem with a shock wave or something to destroy a tornado is that you would not want to use something like that in a populated area as you would cause as much damage as the tornado. If you destroy it in an unpopulated area you have not gained much.
Hover above the planet and look down. Below is Kansas. Imagine a huge oval which is a low pressure zone. Around it is a high pressure zone. The two zones equalize. That equalization process is a giant set of swirls, rather like stirring cream into coffee. The wall of the swirls is what we see as a tornado. If you disrupt the wall, you will not disrupt the event which causes the swirl, which is the huge pressure difference between the zones. If you manage to disrupt one wall, another will form. This formation continues until the pressures equalize.
On the other hand, you might just go down to Brazil and kill the damned butterflies whose wing flapping causes all these storms.
It really depends on the source of rotation. Tornadoes have been know to “skip” over buildings and rivers. Disrupting a tornadoe at ground level may merely cause it to form somewhere else. One theory has the rotaion begining high up, near the jet stream, making the it difficult to turn off a tornado.
No, because angular momentum must be conserved. A nuke would make things worth, drawing things upwards and inwards (which concentrates angular momentum like a whirlpool).
The bomb itself would have to be so powerful that it would cause devastation.
Here are a few numbers - still looking for Tornado info.
“This is equivalent to about 200 times the total electrical generating capacity on the planet! NASA says that “during its life cycle a hurricane can expend as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs!” And we’re just talking about average hurricanes here, not Katrina.”
“In all, Mount St. Helens released 24 megatons of thermal energy, 7 of which was a direct result of the blast. This is equivalent to 1,600 times the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima”
I think this a bad idea. Atmospheric energy must be released; there would be unforeseen consequences.
1) Hard to predict location more than 15 minutes ahead of time
2) The energy in the thunderstorm, and its physical size, are beyond comprehension. These things are 50,000 feet tall.
If I remember Jules Verne wrote a si-fi novel in which they destroyed waterspouts with canon fire.
I don’t remember if it was THE MASTER OF THE WORLD or ROBUR THE CONQUEROR, or a different novel.
We cannot stop one little tornado with a nuclear bomb, but we can change the entire world’s climate by driving around too much in our cars.
I’ve been around tornadoes.
Unless you’re willing to go nuclear, I’m sure there is not enough energy to disrupt one.
I’ll bet they have megatons of energy.
Work was done at NASA Ames on the subject of disrupting twisters back in the 1970s.....takes a lot of energy to disrupt a single touch down when you have multiple outbreaks it doesn’t work. Plus the damage by effort to eliminate the tornado is most likely worse than the tornado it self
I’m kind of on the lines of not trying to alter mother nature.