The idea sounds truly magical: simply blowing tropical storms like Rita and Katrina out of the sky before they reach the ground. However, meteorologists have stated that this is nothing more than a fanciful dream, and they abandoned that ambition many years ago after over two decades of research.
Subsequently, private companies also conducted several limited experiments, but still saw no progress, despite initial beliefs that it might be possible to eliminate dark clouds as soon as they formed in the atmosphere.
“It’s no different from trying to move a car with a straw. The latent energy in a storm is much greater than anything we can accumulate,” remarked Matthew Kelsch from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
The storm diversion research program was proposed back during President Eisenhower’s administration, known as Project Stormfury, after several major storms struck the eastern coast of the United States in the 1950s, killing 749 people and causing billions of dollars in damage.
However, it wasn’t until 1961 that the first experiments were initiated with Hurricane Esther. Scientists used a Navy aircraft to disperse silver iodide crystals. Some reports later indicated that wind speeds had decreased by 10% to 30%.
In the Stormfury project, scientists also sprayed silver iodide crystals on storms in 1963, 1969, and 1971 over the Atlantic Ocean, far from land. Silver iodide—acting as a nucleating agent—was dispersed into clouds just outside the eye of the storm. Their idea was that a new cloud ring would form around the core of the artificial ice nuclei. This cloud ring would alter the rainfall pattern, create a new eye of the storm, and destroy the old one. The modified storm would then rotate slower and thus be less dangerous.
Sometimes, the experiments proved effective. Hurricane Debbie in 1969 was treated with crystals twice within four days using several aircraft. Researchers noted that its intensity decreased by up to 30%.
For the silver iodide spraying to be successful, the clouds must contain a significant amount of supercooled liquid water, remaining in liquid form even at temperatures below 0 degrees Celsius. Raindrops will form when the artificial ice nuclei combine with the supercooled water droplets.
However, scientists found that tropical storms contain fewer supercooled droplets than regular storm clouds, making the spraying of crystals unreliable. This leads to uncertainty in determining whether a storm’s weakening is due to natural causes or human intervention. Consequently, the Stormfury Project was discontinued in the 1980s after spending millions of dollars.
Other solutions to modify storms were also considered, such as cooling tropical sea regions with ice blocks and dispersing particles or films on the ocean surface to suppress storms formed from evaporating warm water. Sometimes, some even suggested detonating a nuclear bomb to break up the storm.
However, researchers indicated that tropical storms render all these solutions “dwarfs.” For example, with a diameter of up to 600 kilometers, how much ice would be needed to neutralize Hurricane Rita! Or what bomb could neutralize energy equivalent to 50-200 trillion watts? If a nuclear bomb were needed to overpower it, humans would have to detonate a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.
T. An (according to AP)
