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Subject: C5c) Why don't we try to destroy
tropical cyclones by nuking them ?
Contributed by Chris Landsea
During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions
that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the
storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the
storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released
radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds
to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems.
Needless to say, this is not a good idea.
Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would
not be an effective hurricane modification technique. The main
difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the
amount of energy required. A fully developed
hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013
watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical
energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a
10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to
the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a
rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the
power of a hurricane.
If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity's
disposal is closer to the storm's, but the task of focusing even
half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean
would still be formidable. Brute force interference with
hurricanes doesn't seem promising.
In addition, an explosive, even a nuclear explosive, produces a
shock wave, or pulse of high pressure, that propagates away from
the site of the explosion somewhat faster than the speed of
sound. Such an event doesn't raise the barometric pressure after
the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the
atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground. For
normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons
(1000 kilograms per ton) of air bearing down on each square
meter of surface. In the strongest hurricanes there are nine. To
change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you
would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter
inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion
(500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to
envision a practical way of moving that much air around.
Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a
chance to grow into hurricanes isn't promising either. About 80
of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but
only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no
way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy
released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released
in a hurricane, it's still a lot of power, so that the hurricane
police would need to dim the whole world's lights many times a
year.
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