CMPRAD
Unregistered
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I have seen all of the ideas about how to modify a hurricane. Many of these ideas although good, aren't enough to modify a hurricane. The best ideas are that of cooling the water temp by dragging iceburgs into the path. The problem with this is you have to know the path (we have a good idea of that nowadays), and you also take much needed ice from an already deteriorating polar region. Not to mention you have to have that iceburg ready and waiting in time to push it in front of a hurricane. My hare brained idea involves cooling the water, but not with polar ice burgs. We would need to cool the entire region of water in the tropics and gulf of Mexico. We would need the water to be cooled just enough to weaken the storm from cat 4 or 5 to cat 1-2. I feel that this can be achieved by stragically placing grids of tubing in the areas of high currents that supply the warm waters to the tropics and Gulf. Running cryogenic material (liquid Oxygen or liquid nitrogen) through these grids would super cool the waters entering into these regions and mix with the warmer water. This would lower the water temp enough so that a hurricane would not necessarily lose strength, but not be able to gain strength. Since most of the storms that enter into the Gulf as a cat 1 or Tropical storm, lowering the water temp can keep these storms from getting more intense.
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CaneTrackerInSoFl
Storm Tracker
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Posts: 395
Loc: Israel
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So in other words, you are willing to ruin the oceanic ecosystem to prevent a storm which actually makes life better in the long term? Not only that but using cryogenic liquids!?! You not only kill the entire ecosystem but you kill the livelihoods of thousands of people. If you don't want to worry about hurricanes don't live near the coast. Its as simple as that.
-------------------- Andrew 1992, Irene 1999, Katrina 2005, Wilma 2005
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CMPRAD
Unregistered
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Exactly how would sealed cryogenic materials kill an ecosystem? The materials wouldn't be released into the water, they would only cool a grid of sorts that the water would pass through. The actual cryogenic liquid would remain sealed in the grid. If you read through the idea, you would see that this strategy would not prevent a storm, only lessen it's strength (or prevent it's strengthening). Doing this is far less ecologically intrusive than the burning of the fossil fuel in your automobile.
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Clark
Meteorologist
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Posts: 1710
Loc:
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Rapid temperature changes are quite damaging to an ecosystem, moreso than slow changes that may or may not be brought upon by global warming effects. Temperature gradients can also enhance energy transfer, such as those found along the edge of the Gulf of Mexico loop current. How significant the cooling would be is quite uncertain.
Simply put, there's nothing to suggest the reward is greater than the gain. Field experiments are not the way to go to try to prove the viability of such an endeavour. Modeling studies need to be done and no one within the field is really interested in doing so; we don't understand enough about hurricanes to even think about modifying them, as we already learned with Project Stormfury in the 1960s, and the potential ramifications of impacting a storm's track by modifying its structure are likely to cause repercussions. Storm tracks are heavily influenced by intensity; if you weaken a storm, you also make it much more likely to impact a different area -- or even just hit land -- than another region.
It's just not a viable option, IMO.
-------------------- Current Tropical Model Output Plots
(or view them on the main page for any active Atlantic storms!)
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