Stupid Hurricane Question

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2005-09-22 10:41am

I always wondered this when I see Hurricanes on those weather reports. Can a hurricane be disrupted by explosive force? For instance if we were to drop a baby nuke or daisy cutter into Rita's eyewall would the resulting explosion disrupt the eyewall thus start breaking up the hurricane or at leats weaken it? Or is there simply not enough reasonable force to do so? Or are hurricanes made up of so many complex things happening at once that disrupting the eye wall would do very little to the over all storm?

Dumb question I know but with all this news about Rita I thought I should finally satisfy this curiosity.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2005-09-22 10:57am

Stravo wrote:I always wondered this when I see Hurricanes on those weather reports. Can a hurricane be disrupted by explosive force? For instance if we were to drop a baby nuke or daisy cutter into Rita's eyewall would the resulting explosion disrupt the eyewall thus start breaking up the hurricane or at leats weaken it? Or is there simply not enough reasonable force to do so? Or are hurricanes made up of so many complex things happening at once that disrupting the eye wall would do very little to the over all storm?

Dumb question I know but with all this news about Rita I thought I should finally satisfy this curiosity.

Short answer: No, next question.

Long answer: No, the energies that a hurricane can release in a day is the equivalent of setting off up to 400 twenty megaton nuclear bombs. 1 All exploding a nuke in a hurricane will do is make the rain that comes out of it that much more radioactive.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2005-09-22 11:02am

A point of clarification. Four-hundred 20 MT bombs is equivalent to 8000 megatons. In comparison, the peak destructive power of the American nuclear arsenal was 20,491 megatons ([urlhttp://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/november96/n ... apons.html]1[/url]). Bear in mind that a hurricane releases 8000 MT of energy per day.

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2005-09-22 11:04am

That's actually quite humbling considering how many lay folks like myself consider a nuke the be all and end all of destructive power.

CoyoteNature · Post by **CoyoteNature** » 2005-09-22 01:00pm

There is some work on using microwaves to heat parts of storms up.

Only problem is that it might just worsen the storm(more research in chaos theory needs to be done before we think of weather control or modification).

Think they were also talking about using a nuke to start a volcanic eruption somewhere, I think it fissiled due to lack of energy from the nuke.(1960s era)

You could use kinetic kill weapons, only problem is any that would produce enough energy that it would be worse then the hurricane.

wolveraptor · Post by **wolveraptor** » 2005-09-22 06:28pm

That'd be a kickass sci-fi weapon. Creating a hurricane to destroy your enemies cities while bombing the living shit out of inland military bases. Better: spurring earthquakes and volcanoes to destroy Hawaii or San Diego.

tharkûn · Post by **tharkûn** » 2005-09-23 01:03am

That'd be a kickass sci-fi weapon.

Why would you need a ridiciously complex weapon to get soft kills? The military can easily build to withstand hurricane force winds, earthquakes, etc. If you are just going to knock down unhardened targets exactly why not just use yea olde explosives, NBC weapons, etc.?

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2005-09-23 01:10am

I second Tharkun's point. Why bother make a hurricane when you and drop a nuclear bomb? Just because a big hurricane can release 400 20 megaton bombs worth of energy in a day doesn't make it a particular good weapon, because it's over the course of a day and over thousands of square kilometers, which is destructive but a few nuclear bombs will still out class it in sheer destruction because they do their work all at once.

Son of the Suns · Post by **Son of the Suns** » 2005-09-23 05:53am

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9440978/

Chris OFarrell · Post by **Chris OFarrell** » 2005-09-23 06:10am

I've always wondered this myself.

I've heard a lot of people say that its impossible and I respect that, given that they cite Government studies done over such a long time which agree.

But what I don't get is why people say its because the storms put out so much energy every day compared to a single bomb.

But when you get down to it, a storm like a Hurricane is a huge very complex machine. It feeds off energy from the oceans and converts it into huge and very complex weather systems which sustain themselves as long as there is 'fuel' for them. In short would a nuke HAVE to blow the thing away to actualy stop it or severly weaken it?

I mean if you drop the right weapon in the right place, couldn't a small amount of energy screw it to hell? A nuclear detonation would superheat a huge amount of air and from little I understand, there are very specific temperature zones inside these storms which are part of the whole machine, each critical to the overall storm. If you were to completely disrupt these and by extension the flow of energy, could you choke the thing to death? Or the blast wave from such a detonation that would for a short time push air out with great pressure against the storms own air currents and patterns. In the right place, could it disput the complicated internal dance enough to start the wind machine stalling? The eye of the storm has its equilibrium because of the way storm rotates around it correct? Can we poke that balance enough to cause it to collapse on itself or something?

Going back to the car analogy mentioned, sure a BB shell won't directly dent a car. But if it was able to block the fuel lines for just a matter of seconds, the engine would stall and the car would stop, without HAVING to blow the car away with matching amounts of energy. I know a detonation would hardly blow the clouds away in a massive blast effect…but the right ‘poke’ in the right place…

Once again I know very little about the dynamics of this kind of weather, so I am purely speculating here. Given that lack of even an experiment in the ole Nuke Happy days, I'm sure I have it all wrong and there are very specific reasons why I have this wrong.

But could SOMEONE tell me?

CoyoteNature · Post by **CoyoteNature** » 2005-09-23 01:01pm

Its too concentrated and effects to small of a area for their to be much of a disruption(plus not enough energy. Ideally you'd need some way to spread the energy out over a larger area, why some research proposes using microwaves to artificially heat portions of storm systems, because you can spread the energy out a bit. Also if you detonated enough nukes to make a difference you'd cause more damage than the hurrican ever would.

Only problem is we don't know how this would work out, weather systems are to complex, why more research in chaos theory needs to be worked out for any reliable disruption control of weather systems.

GrandMasterTerwynn · Post by **GrandMasterTerwynn** » 2005-09-23 01:15pm

Chris OFarrell wrote:I've always wondered this myself.

I've heard a lot of people say that its impossible and I respect that, given that they cite Government studies done over such a long time which agree.

But what I don't get is why people say its because the storms put out so much energy every day compared to a single bomb.

But when you get down to it, a storm like a Hurricane is a huge very complex machine. It feeds off energy from the oceans and converts it into huge and very complex weather systems which sustain themselves as long as there is 'fuel' for them. In short would a nuke HAVE to blow the thing away to actualy stop it or severly weaken it?

I mean if you drop the right weapon in the right place, couldn't a small amount of energy screw it to hell? A nuclear detonation would superheat a huge amount of air and from little I understand, there are very specific temperature zones inside these storms which are part of the whole machine, each critical to the overall storm. If you were to completely disrupt these and by extension the flow of energy, could you choke the thing to death? Or the blast wave from such a detonation that would for a short time push air out with great pressure against the storms own air currents and patterns. In the right place, could it disput the complicated internal dance enough to start the wind machine stalling? The eye of the storm has its equilibrium because of the way storm rotates around it correct? Can we poke that balance enough to cause it to collapse on itself or something?

Going back to the car analogy mentioned, sure a BB shell won't directly dent a car. But if it was able to block the fuel lines for just a matter of seconds, the engine would stall and the car would stop, without HAVING to blow the car away with matching amounts of energy. I know a detonation would hardly blow the clouds away in a massive blast effect…but the right ‘poke’ in the right place…

Once again I know very little about the dynamics of this kind of weather, so I am purely speculating here. Given that lack of even an experiment in the ole Nuke Happy days, I'm sure I have it all wrong and there are very specific reasons why I have this wrong.

But could SOMEONE tell me?

A hurricane is an enormous thing, its core spanning up to a few hundred kilometers across, and affecting an area up to a couple thousand kilometers across. Sure you could detonate a nuclear bomb somewhere in that enormous mess, maybe evaporate a cloudbank a few tens of kilometers across. Of course, you'll be sucking up a lot of conveniently pre-heated water-vapor into the storm as well. And hurricanes feed off of the energy released when heated water-vapor condenses into water droplets. Depending on where the nuke goes off, you could well end up strengthening the hurricane some hours later. Worse still, it will be a hurricane that will dump radioactive rain somewhere.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2005-09-23 03:24pm

To add to the maser suggestion, there was a think-tank study not long ago that looked into averting natural disastera of all varieties. One that was focused on hurricanes and potentially tornadoes as well was using orbital mirrors as another form of shifting the hurricane or disrupting it enough to cease the mechanics that make it what it is. Of course, they said this was something you'd need to invest a lot of cash and R&D in first (the building of such orbital mirrors is far beyond us right now and could be classed as incoherent directed energy weapons to boot) and since chaos theory is, well, chaotic by nature, like the nuke scenario we can't predict if it the chosen strategy will reduce or amplify the storm effect. At least it wouldn't involve radio isotopes.

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