Can You Stop a Hurricane?

Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm Horee Cham and today we're answering the question can you stop a hurricane? Hurricanes are some of the most destructive phenomena in nature. A Category four or five hurricane can cause upwards of one hundred billion dollars in damage and kill thousands of people depending on where it hits when

Yeah, it's great to talk to you about hurricanes here.

Well, describe for us what is your current job as a hurricane hunter.

So, as a hurricane hunters, our job is take an airplane into a hurricane. I'm at the no Aircraft Operations Center as a flight director and meteorologist. So my job in the airplanes is essentially helped navigate the storm, help the pilots out and make sure the data is quality and make sure we're getting the data to the ground.

How would you describe what a hurricane is?

Complete chaos at times. Obviously they're very large in scale and when you go out fly one, you can really feel the scale of the motion, the scale of the energy. So for us, we see them as the danger they are. We see them for the hazards they are.

So this sounds super dangerous.

Why do it? So?

We often gets the question why do it? Why fly an airplane into a hurricane? Right, We're taking a crew into a very turbulent environment, just a little bit more hazardous than an any pilot would do. But the reality is that satellite they see the big scale, right, they see the cloud field, they see where it's located. But to actually see inside those clouds, to see the rain

Okay, I asked, doctor, is always like, how do you actually fly into a hurricane?

How we sample a hurricane with an airplane? First of all, No, we have a four engine turboprop airplane called a P three. They are our storm petting trading aircraft, so they were built to fly low and slow and they could take a punishing too. What we do is we'll set up a direct path from outside the storm to the eye to the other side, and it's a straight line, right. The safest way to fly a storm is a straight line. It's just you get in and out quickest, right.

Could you maybe describe the whole experience. You take off, you're flying, You're approaching the storm. What do you see.

It's just basically you start getting cloudier, You're starting to get the rain. You might have a really strong outer band, which is a really intense thin line of thunderstorms, and we're gonna have to navigate through that. You just kind of have to find the weak spot and get through the outer band.

Okay, here I thought would be good to explain where we are in the hurricane. You can think of a hurricane as a giant area of circulating air. The area is typically three hundred but sometimes up to six hundred miles wide. And if you've ever seen a satellite image of a hurricane, it basically looks like a giant white cloud that is flushing down the toilet. But actually a

And then you start getting towards fifty sixty miles away from storm, and now things start happening, right. You're encountering more turbulence, the winds are coming up, and I always say the biggest thing that happens is it gets really loud. On the airplane. It's already loud enough because of the four turboprops running on you, but once you start getting the wind, you start really getting the heavy rain, so it gets really really loud, particularly in the stronger storms.

Okay. As you get closer to the center, the winds get faster and faster, up to about seventy to ninety miles per hour, and then when you get to about thirty miles from the center of the storm, you reach the final band of the hurricane. Here the winds can reach up to one hundred and sixteen miles per hour. This part, called the eye wall, is the one that causes the most destruction when it reaches land.

The eyewall is essentially a giant rainfield that's rotating. Now I don't want to call it a tornado, but it has that really strong intensi so it's creating a lot of turbulent eddies, really really intense turbulent eddies.

Yeah.

Well, then if you make it through that chaotic, intense, spinning eye wall, you get to clear, calm air.

So when you get in the eye, the rain comes down, the winds come down, You look out the window, you're gonna generally see a clear area. So if you ever see the really infamous pictures or hurricanes of that clear eye, that's what we call a stadium effect. You just emerge into the stadium and it's clear above. Everything calms down, and you just get this beautiful bowl of clouds. So

Oh, I see. The more beautiful it is, the more dangerous it is to people outside the storm.

Right. A lot of times that's happening because the storm is just so intense, right, So it's a magnificent, saddling image. It's magnificence flying that statement effect, But it's also a bit frightening to us because you know that storm is extremely intense.

What got you're interested in this field in doing this?

Yeah, ask my parents. I was growing up. There's two great gloves I had.

Flying.

Just loved when we took a vacation every summer and flew there. But I also loved weather. My first book I could ever read it was a meteorology book, a weather guide. Right now, my job is to fly in weather, so I get to work with aircraft, I get to study the weather, so I say I am living the dream.

You might say you're right in the eye of the storm.

Yeah, we're ring the eye of storm.

All right. So having met someone who flies into hurricanes for a living, the big question now was whether he thinks we can stop a hurricane. A lot of people are wondering but on the internet, if you can stop a hurricane, how would you answer that question?

Scientifically? If you have to think about the scale and the energy of a hurricane. Okay, this is a cloud field that is several hundred miles large. A hurricane itself will released an equivalent heat of about ten thousand nuclear bombs. Okay, that's a lot of energy.

Okay. When we come back, we're really going to dig into this question. We're going to talk about all the different ways people have proposed to stop a hurricane, and we're going to talk to different experts about whether they think any of these ways would work. Stay with us, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Okay. We just heard a first hand account what it's like to go inside a hurricane, and now we're going to answer the question

Hello.

I'm a professor of meteorology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, and my research is primarily hurricanes, how they form, and trying to help out the public with proving the warnings and watch us.

I'll ask doctor Heart in a minute if we can stop a hurricane. But first I thought it was important to talk about how hurricanes form because that's going to help us a little later. Okay, back to the conversation.

Amazing.

I guess we'll start with can you give us a brief overview of how hurricanes form?

That's an hour question right there.

Sorry, we need a whirlwind answer from you.

They don't just appear with an eye suddenly. Usually it takes several days for it to go from disorganized thunderstorms in the tropics to organized thunderstorms to having an eye could take several days to a week, sometimes even longer, and it has a life cycle of formation and growth.

Can you maybe step us through that life cycle, like, how do hurricanes get started?

Well, there's not one way, and it's a big area of debate right now.

Really, we don't know exactly how hurricanes form.

We know so some aspects of it.

That's right, It seems we don't know exactly how hurricanes form. According to doctor Hart, we know what the basic ingredients are for making a hurricane, but we can't really predict exactly when those ingredients will turn into a hurricane. Here's how doctor Hart explains it.

We know that you need to have some rotation in the atmosphere, whether that's due to the Earth turning corioliss or due to something else like a front. If you have that, and you have a moist atmosphere and you're over warm water, then those thunderstorms can become increasingly strong, increasingly more organized. But the million dollar question that we've been debating for quite a while now is what specifically causes those thunderstorms to get organized and what's enough.

When you say organized, what do you mean.

Well, if you look at a satellite image of the tropics, you'll find that on average, thunderstorms are pretty sporadic. There's popcorn type thunderstorms. You know, thunderstorm in one location and then an hour away there's another thunderstorm, but in between

Okay, here's a quick breakdown of how a typical hurricane forms. You start with a patch of warm ocean. That's where most of the energy for a hurricane comes from. That's what powers the hurricane. This patch of warm water heats up the air above it, causing it to go up, and as it goes up, it kind of creates a vacuum, pulling in more air from the surrounding area. So it's a little like someone brought in a giant vacuum host

Yeah, it's a feedback where the warming that occurs in the column above the storm ends up leading to lower pressure even more warming, and so it's a nonlinear feedback that strengthening of a hurricane makes even more strengthening possible. And the theory says that as long as you don't have something getting in the way of that, like land or cold water, the hurricane will continue to strengthen, but it doesn't reach infinity.

According to doctor Hart, hurricanes would continue to grow and grow indefinitely if it wasn't for one thing friction.

There's a reason why we have a category five as a maximum, and that's because as it gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and now we're talking about winds of approaching two hundred miles an hour. The friction goes up very very quickly with friction between what with the ocean, so friction between the air and the ocean's while we get large waves in hurricanes. So eventually that friction becomes so strong that this hurricane cannot intensify any further.

Okay, those are the basics of how hurricanes form. Now let's get to the main question, which is can you stop a hurricane? All right? Now we get to the kind of controversial part of the topic here. What are some ways that people have said you can maybe stop a hurricane? All right? According to doctor Hart, there are three basic ways you can try to stop a hurricane. Number one, you can mess with the way a hurricane forms.

There were some experiments, it's about seventy five years ago now, Project Storm Fury, where they did cloud seating of hurricanes.

What does that mean.

They put certain chemicals in the atmosphere in thunderstorms or near thunderstorms to dissipate those thunderstorms. So this was like one of the earliest tests of weather modification.

What did these chemicals? What were they supposed to do?

They would reduce the relative you met the air, so the cloud would go away, or you could turn the liquid more to ice, which changes the physics of the air.

I see. It'd be like throwing salt up into the atmosphere to lower the freezing point. Maybe something like that.

Yeah, okay.

One way to try to mess with how a hurricane forms is to spray the clouds in a hurricane with basically anti freeze, or actually the opposite of anti freeze. And this is something scientists actually tried. Project Storm Fury was a twenty year joint project between the US Navy and the Department of Commerce where they experimented with spring silver iodide to the clouds outside the eye of a hurricane.

The results were nonconclusive, and the reason why they were abandoned and never done again. Was because they could not prove that there was a cause and effect there. Sometimes it didn't have any effect, sometimes there was an intensification, and sometimes they weaken anyway, So that experiment's never been redone. And you're of course modifying the environment. With all this junk that you're throwing into the atmosphere, you would be

I see. So it could be an environmental disaster.

Yes, okay, without saving another environmental disaster.

Right, right, okay? What are some other ideas that people have floated out there?

Pumping up cold water from the deep ocean. Once you get deep enough, let's say, beyond maybe two hundred and three hundred feet, the ocean begins to cool and some of the ideas are to pump up that cold water to the surface to cool off the surface of the ocean such that all that physics we talked about and that feedback doesn't occur or shuts down.

Another idea to stop the hurricane is to shut off the source of our hurricanes energy, which is the heat in the ocean, presumably would deploy something like an array of deep water pumps that go down two hundred to three hundred meters and bring up cold water through hoses or tubes. This could technically work, but.

The problem is you need to cool over a large area for one storm, and in order to cool or for a large area, you need to drop all these devices that we haven't even created yet, and that means you have to fly them out there in the right location. And of course then you also realize that, well, we don't know the forecast of these things incredibly well, which means by the time you get there that forecasts may have changed, and now you've missed your opportunity.

In other words, you could build this array of water pumps and deploy them, but you need to build a lot of them to cover a large area hundreds of miles wide, and then you might miss the hurricane could unexpectedly veer off and miss the area of the ocean you were cooling off, So then you need even more of these pumps. It all gets super expensive. Pumping cold water that's also just prohibitively expensive, and you don't know if it's going to work. Yeah, all right, what are

Yeah, I've gotten those questions from the public. Those go back, you know, twenty years when I started teaching at FSU, before social media became a real big thing. These sort of questions become very nice graduate school questions for candidacy exam for PhD students to pursue their PhD, because they have to go through the math of figuring out is this feasible sort of and what are the downsides to it? Well, all the physics that we've talked about at the beginning

In other words, what doctor Hart is saying is you could stop a hurricane by blowing it up, but you need about ten thousand nuclear bombs, which is basically all the nuclear bombs on Earth. That's just to stop one hurricane. There would still be more hurricanes that season, and the next year and the year after that, not to mention the enormous mess exploding ten thousand nuclear bombs would make.

And so even if you were to do that, we don't know where to put them these weapons, Like where exactly do you put them? Do you put them in a circle outside the eye? Well, well we don't know. In the outer part of the storm, we don't know. And even if you could do that with phenomenal resources, probably more resources than it would take to go to Mars, you now have caused a massive environmental disaster, both in the ocean and the air in this attempt.

Meaning you've basically radiated the entire Atlantic Ocean kind of and the.

Atmosphere there above it, and the food, the food supply because so much of the world's food comes from the ocean, and the greenhouse effect that exists. Of course, because you're modifying the structure of the ocean. It's a nightmare. The planet would be destitute financially, resource wise.

Yeah, let's not do that, all right. When we come back, we're going to explore this idea more, and we're going to learn about the time when humans they have inadvertently stopped several hurricanes. Stay with us, you're listening to science stuff and we're back. But the people have mentioned Saharan dust and wind turbines.

Yes, there's wind over Africa. Those winds often carry dust into the atmosphere of the Atlantic, and that dust changes the physics of the atmosphere there, causes it to be drier, causes it to be warmer. So that changes the ability to form thunderstorms.

So the idea to put more dust or less dust.

Well, you would want more dust in theory that would prevent the thunder storms or decrease the likelihood of thunder storms going all the way up in the atmosphere. But yet again, this is a lot of dust you would need over a large area.

You need to be pumping dust all year over a huge amount of space.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of the people that live in Africa and otherwise would appreciate having enormous fans blowing at all this dust into the Atlantic air and also changing the surface there and probably hurting rainforests as well.

So you could also stop a hurricane by throwing dust at it, but again, the skills such that you need an enormous amount of dust, how would you blow all that dust from Africa? Okay? The last idea here is to use a wind turbine basically a fan to try to blow a hurricane away or at least a mess with it. Okay, and then really quick wind turbines. I imagine it's the same idea somehow you put wind turbines.

And yeah, that was one of the emails that somebody had tried to patent an enormous ship like device that would basically redirect air in a hurricane, preventing it from strengthening. And the same questions logistically come to mind is even if you could build this in enormously expensive device, how do you lift it? And if you're going to have

WHOA all right, So what does this all mean for a question today? Can you stop a hurricane? I feel like all of these potential solutions could work if we just crazy scale up the engineering, throw all our money into it, not worry about environmental disaster. I feel like maybe the answer can we stop a hurricane is yes, but maybe we don't want to. Yes.

I think we could be able to stop hurricane century from now, let's say, when we're in a very different technological environment, ideally with a lot more resources and a lot better understanding.

So we might be able to stop hurricanes. But here's the surprising part of the answer. According to doctor Hart, we may not want to because when you mess with nature, things can happen that you didn't expect.

So there's also the political aspect of that that you know, Okay, well, what if it did work and you change the path storm if you did cloud seating, Let's say of a hurricane that was a day or two away from one country and you weakened it, you could change the track slightly enough that it ends up hitting another country nearby, or ends up going into a major city rather than

Oh, it becomes kind of like a hot potato.

Yes, yeah, I guess the best thing for me to close in on is hurricanes themselves are a part of the climate, just like winter storms are, just like tornadoes are. They occur, they play a role, and usually that role goes back to, well, it's hotter in the tropics, it's colder in the poles, and we're trying to redistribute the heat. Well, if we don't allow these hurricanes to occur, we may get something worse, something different that we're not prepared for. Anyway.

Okay, we heard from a hurricane hunter about what it's like to go into hurricane. We talked about a lot of the ways humans have proposed to stop hurricanes, and so far none of them seem to work or be very practical. Now, does that mean we are helpless against the forces of nature? Not necessarily. It turns out there is an instance where hu may have inadvertently stopped not one, but several hurricanes. It's something I learned when I talk to Professor Gave Becky and I asked him how the

My name is Abe Becky. I'm a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, and I do research on how climate affects weather events, including hurricanes.

Amazing, I was wondering how has the frequency of hurricanes changed over time?

So the part that we can answer very clearly and unambiguously is that over the last forty years, the frequency of hurricanes in the Atlantic has gone up a lot. We have satellites and those let us see hurricanes very well over the last forty years, and we are almost one hundred percent sure that they've increased in the Atlantic over the last forty years.

How many hurricanes are we talking about here per year in the Atlantic.

In the Atlantic, the average number of hurricanes, if you go and you look before nineteen ninety five, that average was much lower, as more than four, and recently that average is eight or so. It's a substantial increase in the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic over the last forty years.

All right, what doctor Vicki's saying is that the number of hurricanes per year has been going up since the nineteen eighties. But here's the weird part. Before this happened, the number of hurricanes per year went down.

So this increase over the last forty years was preceded by a decrease over the preceding forty years. So if you look at the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic from World War II, or they say the nineteen thirties to the nineteen eighties, they showed a very dramatic decrease comparable to the increase that we've seen over the last forty years.

These changes in the number of hurricanes are significant, which makes the question what happened and here scientists are not sure, but there are a few hypotheses, the first being that it's a random fluctuation of the ocean currents.

The climate system. It sort of fluctuates on its own. It can have time scales of decades. And in the Atlantic there's this current it's called the Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation. It's a mouthful. This current brings warm surface water to the north across the Atlantic, and that current seems to fluctuate. Some decades, it's stronger, some decades it's weaker. And so one hypothesis is that those chaotic fluctuations have led to

Okay, what doctor Vicki's saying is that there are two possible reasons why the number of hurricanes went down in the nineteen eighties. One is that it's a natural cycle of the ocean currents in the Atlantic, and the other is that it's due to us. After World War II, we started burning coal like crazy, and that could have

We don't know whether the number of hurricanes in a warming climate goes up or goes down. We know it's possible that it might change by a considerable amount. Now, this is where we get to the other metric, which is intensity, and there we have a lot more consistency and understanding that the peak intensity of hurricanes in a warmer world should increase. And that's because hurricanes draw energy from the warm ocean and the moisture, and so as you warm the planet, you have more energy in the

Intensities and therefore be deadlier. Exactly, all right, so recap, can you stop the hurricane? The answer seems to be yes, we can stop a single hurricane, but it would be too expensive and unpredictable with current technology. And yes, our actions can affect how many hurricanes happen and how deadly they are. I think what's clear is that we need