Posted on 09/22/2005 11:46:25 AM PDT by Diogenez
The U.S. Government once supported research into methods of hurricane modification, known as Project STORMFURY. For a couple decades NOAA and its predecessor tried to weaken hurricanes by dropping silver iodide - a substance that serves as a effective ice nuclei - into the rainbands of the storms. During the STORMFURY years scientists seeded clouds in Hurricanes Esther (1961), Beulah (1963), Debbie (1969), and Ginger (1971). The experiments took place over the open Atlantic far from land. The STORMFURY seeding targeted convective clouds just outside the hurricane's eyewall in an attempt to form a new ring of clouds that, it was hoped, would compete with the natural circulation of the storm and weaken it. The idea was that the silver iodide would enhance the thunderstorms of a rainband by causing the supercooled water to freeze, thus liberating the latent heat of fusion and helping a rainband to grow at the expense of the eyewall. With a weakened convergence to the eyewall, the strong inner core winds would also weaken quite a bit. For cloud seeding to be successful, the clouds must contain sufficient supercooled water (water that has remained liquid at temperatures below the freezing point, 0°C/32°F). Neat idea, but it, in the end, had a fatal flaw. Observations made in the 1980s showed that most hurricanes don't have enough supercooled water for STORMFURY seeding to work - the buoyancy in hurricane convection is fairly small and the updrafts correspondingly small compared to the type one would observe in mid-latitude continental super or multicells.
In addition, it was found that unseeded hurricanes form natural outer eyewalls just as the STORMFURY scientists expected seeded ones to do. This phenomenon makes it almost impossible to separate the effect (if any) of seeding from natural changes. The few times that they did seed and saw a reduction in intensity was undoubtedly due to what is now called "concentric eyewall cycles". Thus nature accomplishes what NOAA had hoped to do artificially. No wonder that the first few experiments were thought to be successes. Because the results of seeding experiments were so inconclusive, STORMFURY was discontinued. 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. The primary focus of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division today is better physical understanding of hurricanes and improvement of forecasts. To learn about the STORMFURY project as it was called, read Willoughby et al. (1985).
"Weather Modification Research and Technology Transfer Authorization Act of 2005."
Its purpose ...? Here's a direct quote from the Senate version of Bill S. 517:SEC. 2. PURPOSE.
It is the purpose of this Act to develop and implement a comprehensive and coordinated national weather modification policy and a national cooperative Federal and State program of weather modification research and development ....
"It is the purpose of this Act to develop and implement a comprehensive and coordinated national weather modification policy and a national cooperative Federal and State program of weather modification research and development ...."
Yep. Probably worth the investment, since we are in the early phases of a 40 year nasty weather cycle.
That begs the question; what risk are we willing to assume over the weather? An act of god is beyond our control, but altering a natural process, exposes us for our direct intervention. What if we spark a flood over Cuba in order to reduce a CAT 5 to a CAT 4; would that be an act of war?
They just need to get a whole bunch of airplanes, to fly clockwise about 200mph, around the hurricane, in ever-decreasing circles.
It would make more sense to change the zoning and construction standards to resist the worst that a catagory V storms can throw at us.
Government modifying the weather. OK if it benefits you. Someone will object, claim to have gotten wet when they didn't want or didn't get rain when they should and the lawyers will get richer.
How about a liquid nitrogen MOAB?
It may be cheaper just to rebuild the house 4 or 5 times.
NO. That is messing with Mother Nature and the natural order of things. I think this article shows how much man thinks of himself and how much he thinks he can do to change the order. Dangerous.
I just don't see puny mankind being able to put much of a dent in a hurricane - without tempting even more catastrophic consequences.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr's brother invented the cloud seeding thing...
LOL.
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