Hurricane Theorists Awhirl With Ideas
A hurricane with winds topping 100 mph churns dangerously off the coast. Jets fly in and release a potion to weaken it before it hits land, saving lives and countless millions of dollars in damage.
Sound outlandish?
Not to the federal government, which in the 1960s embarked upon an ambitious, yet flawed, program to try to take the punch out of powerful hurricanes.
After two decades, hundreds of millions of dollars and four field tests, the outcome of “Project Stormfury” was inconclusive. The U.S. government no longer experiments with hurricane modification.
But that hasn’t stopped other scientists, inventors and average folks from coming up with zany ways to tweak Mother Nature. Ideas range from the goofy (build giant windmills along the coast to blow hurricanes away) to promising (dump an absorbent powder into a storm to suck up its moisture).
“A lot of people really have the burning desire to save lives and save property,” said Stormfury founder Bob Simpson, 88, a retired meteorologist who lives in Washington, D.C. “It becomes an emotional thing that attracts a lot of people.”
From seeding clouds to putting a film over the ocean to prevent absorption, it all works--in theory. So far, though, none of the ideas has been able to overcome the primary obstacle: a hurricane’s sheer size.
“It’s always going to take more miracle active ingredient or more energy than we can focus on it,” said Hugh Willoughby, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane research division in Miami.
Nearly half the economic loss from tropical storms between 1925 and 1995 was caused by just 10 Category 4 hurricanes, which have winds from 131 mph to 151 mph. If the next major storm could be weakened, the lifesaving effects could be monumental.
The federal government was spurred to study hurricane modification after six killer hurricanes hit the East Coast in 1954 and 1955, causing about 400 deaths and more than $6 billion in damages.
In its cloud-seeding project, Navy planes dropped silver iodide into four hurricanes with the intent of freezing cold water and releasing heat to cause storms to break up.
The storms did indeed weaken, but testing left it unclear whether that happened naturally or because of the government-sponsored seeding.
“There was this major ‘Oops,’ ” Willoughby said.
Hurricane Andrew in 1992, for example, weakened from a Category 4 to a Category 3, then surged back to a Category 4 before pummeling South Florida.
These days, Willoughby said he gets about five letters a year with hurricane modification ideas, while the nearby National Hurricane Center gets many more.
“Twenty-five percent are incoherent,” he said. “Half are coherent but it doesn’t make any real physical sense.”
Those include proposals to build giant windmills along the coast or firing torpedoes of liquid nitrogen into storms.
Some ideas appear slightly promising, he said, such as an absorbent used in gardening to retain water in soil and a massive U-shaped pipe atop a submarine to inject air into the eye and tear it apart.
Willoughby said the best possibility is a film to prevent warm ocean currents from fueling a storm, but no one has developed a product to survive hurricane-strength winds.
Businessman Peter Cordani believes his absorbent powder called “Dyn-O-Gel” would reduce a hurricane’s winds by up to 15 mph by absorbing water in the eye wall and turning it into a gel that drops to the ocean. Willoughby concluded after a test conducted by Cordani last summer that the granules weren’t powerful enough to modify a hurricane, but could be used as a rainmaker.
Cordani said that since then he has developed a stronger powder, which absorbs 2,000 times rather than 250 times its weight in water.
He will conduct another test in July a few miles off Florida’s east coast, when a C-130 plane will drop 20,000 pounds of his product into a thunderstorm. If it’s successful, Cordani said he will try to get federal money to continue the project, which has so far cost his company $400,000.
“This test should prove it,” said Cordani, chief operating officer of Riviera Beach-based Dyn-O-Mat, which makes absorbent products.
Fernando Morales acknowledges he will have a hard time getting the $5 million he believes he needs to research his idea: a pipe to pump liquid oxygen from the outer cloud into the eye of the storm.
“When you fill the eye of the hurricane with air to equalize the pressure, the walls that are water molecules disappear,” said Morales, who lives in Reston, Va. “The whole thing disassembles.”
But Willoughby argues that Morales would need a pipe 40 miles long to reach beyond the 20-mile eye, and he would need to overcome storage and transportation problems.
Getting money for any idea is difficult because the federal government appropriates no money for hurricane modification and scientists are skeptical. According to the American Meteorological Society, no hypothesis for hurricane modification has ever been proven to work.
But Simpson, who after 40 years of study remains optimistic, said a hurricane’s power one day will be used to make it fight itself and tear itself apart.
“If there’s anything at all in the system that’s unstable,” he said, “it’s a hurricane.”
On the Net:
Hurricane Research Center: https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/
Dyn-O-Mat: https://www.dynomat.com/index.shtml
