Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 feeder wrote:
Would it be theoretically possible to build a contained continuous hurricane generator? Since a storm is essentially atmosphere+ temperature, could we potentially build a bio-dome that exists to create storm-generated energy?

Bear in mind I was seriously impressed with the human battery plant when I first watched the Matrix. Science is not my strong suit.

Yeah... Going to say no. Again, talking sheer scale here. Hundreds of miles wide, TRILLIONS of gallons of water. Hurricanes are such a humbling force of nature. There is literally nothing else on earth that comes close to them. Even in our loudest attempts at shouting "HEY LOOK AT ME!" we don't come close to what one of these things do.

 djones520 wrote:
As Dakka's resident meteorologist, let me just make a statement that this would do nothing to the storm.

You're talking about hitting a storm the size of Georgia, with a nuclear weapon, and expecting it to do something.

Your AVERAGE hurricane produces 600 terawatts of energy. In contrast, the Hiroshima bomb generated about 3 megawatts of energy.

A nuclear weapon wouldn't even register as a blip to a hurricane, let alone disrupt it.

An average hurricane generates 600,000,000,000,000 joules of energy per second.
A 1 megaton hydrogen blast generates 42,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy.

You don't think that could cause a blip to a hurricane?

I'm not saying a nuke is more powerful - obviously not, compared to the sustained duration of a storm. I just think a megaton bomb, or a series of bombs could dramatically effect a hurricane. It's not like you have to match something's energy to destabilize it.
Of course the downside is that if things go wrong you might actually add too much heat to the storm and increase its strength.

 djones520 wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Would it be theoretically possible to build a contained continuous hurricane generator? Since a storm is essentially atmosphere+ temperature, could we potentially build a bio-dome that exists to create storm-generated energy?

Bear in mind I was seriously impressed with the human battery plant when I first watched the Matrix. Science is not my strong suit.

Yeah... Going to say no. Again, talking sheer scale here. Hundreds of miles wide, TRILLIONS of gallons of water. Hurricanes are such a humbling force of nature. There is literally nothing else on earth that comes close to them. Even in our loudest attempts at shouting "HEY LOOK AT ME!" we don't come close to what one of these things do.

This is why you can't use a nuke to stop a hurricane. The OP actually has to understand what weather is in the first place, and the scale of it. A hurricane is not just a little wind contained in a single place that you can puff on and it goes away. It shaped, driven, and powered by patterns and energy that extends to a global scale. Kind of like how if you parked a bulldozer on a mountain slope, it's not going to stop the avalanche coming down the mountain. Sure, you might catch an impressive load of snow in the scoop, but uh, well, there's still the entire rest of the avalanche doing its thing.

 Bookwrack wrote:

 djones520 wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Would it be theoretically possible to build a contained continuous hurricane generator? Since a storm is essentially atmosphere+ temperature, could we potentially build a bio-dome that exists to create storm-generated energy?

Bear in mind I was seriously impressed with the human battery plant when I first watched the Matrix. Science is not my strong suit.

Yeah... Going to say no. Again, talking sheer scale here. Hundreds of miles wide, TRILLIONS of gallons of water. Hurricanes are such a humbling force of nature. There is literally nothing else on earth that comes close to them. Even in our loudest attempts at shouting "HEY LOOK AT ME!" we don't come close to what one of these things do.

This is why you can't use a nuke to stop a hurricane. The OP actually has to understand what weather is in the first place, and the scale of it. A hurricane is not just a little wind contained in a single place that you can puff on and it goes away. It shaped, driven, and powered by patterns and energy that extends to a global scale. Kind of like how if you parked a bulldozer on a mountain slope, it's not going to stop the avalanche coming down the mountain. Sure, you might catch an impressive load of snow in the scoop, but uh, well, there's still the entire rest of the avalanche doing its thing.

Indeed.

This is Hurricane Isaac.



Hurricane Sandy.
[img]
https://img.purch.com/w/660/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5zcGFjZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzAyMy8yMjAvb3JpZ2luYWwvaHVycmljYW5lLXNhbmR5LTBjdC0yOC0yMDEyLWdvZXMxMy5qcGc=[/img]

Hurricanes are freaking huge.

 amanita wrote:
With the impending landfall of now category 5 Hurricane Irma, I was wondering if anyone has ever thought of disrupting a major storm at sea with a nuclear device? Setting off a hydrogen bomb to one side of the storm might cause a severe braking action o to the gathering maelstrom while keeping fallout to a minimum.

Has anyone ever heard of such a proposal or are the risks just too high? It would be nice to see the destructive potential of a nuke used for something beneficial.

There was some theoretical research done back in the Cold War on that subject. It was determined that A: The big hydrogen bombs only have a fraction of the power of even a "middle of the road" hurricane (in terms of intensity) and B: the blast effects of a major thermonuclear weapon would have no impact toward dissipating a hurricane. It wasn't worth the risk of potential fallout (which due to the mechanics of a hurricane, would be present even it the weapon was airbursted in the eye).


The old fashioned methods of dealing with a hurricane, such as evacuation, observation, and battening down the hatches, are still the best methods.

I mean, the great red spot on Jupiter is the largest hurricane in the known universe and I can't even see it with my naked eye.

Fake news.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

The old fashioned methods of dealing with a hurricane, such as evacuation, observation, and battening down the hatches, are still the best methods.

Yeah honestly

You generally see it coming miles and miles away.

systematic evacuations and properly planed shelter sites would probably save quite a lot of people.

it sucks for peoples stuff but its the kinda thing you can plan for or replace.

 amanita wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
As Dakka's resident meteorologist, let me just make a statement that this would do nothing to the storm.

You're talking about hitting a storm the size of Georgia, with a nuclear weapon, and expecting it to do something.

Your AVERAGE hurricane produces 600 terawatts of energy. In contrast, the Hiroshima bomb generated about 3 megawatts of energy.

A nuclear weapon wouldn't even register as a blip to a hurricane, let alone disrupt it.

An average hurricane generates 600,000,000,000,000 joules of energy per second.
A 1 megaton hydrogen blast generates 42,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy.

You don't think that could cause a blip to a hurricane?

I'm not saying a nuke is more powerful - obviously not, compared to the sustained duration of a storm. I just think a megaton bomb, or a series of bombs could dramatically effect a hurricane. It's not like you have to match something's energy to destabilize it.
Of course the downside is that if things go wrong you might actually add too much heat to the storm and increase its strength.

Here is an analogy. Imagine a vortex in a river rapid. The nuclear explosion will be represented by throwing a rock the size of a basketball into it. It will make a big splash but the vortex will still continue to turn and within moments it will be as is nothing had happened.

 Xenomancers wrote:

 amanita wrote:

 djones520 wrote:
As Dakka's resident meteorologist, let me just make a statement that this would do nothing to the storm.

You're talking about hitting a storm the size of Georgia, with a nuclear weapon, and expecting it to do something.

Your AVERAGE hurricane produces 600 terawatts of energy. In contrast, the Hiroshima bomb generated about 3 megawatts of energy.

A nuclear weapon wouldn't even register as a blip to a hurricane, let alone disrupt it.

An average hurricane generates 600,000,000,000,000 joules of energy per second.
A 1 megaton hydrogen blast generates 42,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy.

You don't think that could cause a blip to a hurricane?

I'm not saying a nuke is more powerful - obviously not, compared to the sustained duration of a storm. I just think a megaton bomb, or a series of bombs could dramatically effect a hurricane. It's not like you have to match something's energy to destabilize it.
Of course the downside is that if things go wrong you might actually add too much heat to the storm and increase its strength.

Here is an analogy. Imagine a vortex in a river rapid. The nuclear explosion will be represented by throwing a rock the size of a basketball into it. It will make a big splash but the vortex will still continue to turn and within moments it will be as is nothing had happened.

Exactly.

Throwing the rock in(blowing up a nuke) may temporarily disrupt the circular flow of water(hurricane), but it won't change the conditions that cause the vortex to form in the first place(tropical depression over warm waters resulting in a storm cell forming).

There is only one way to stop a hurricane. We get every Bears fan, ship them down to Florida for an all you can eat cabbage and bratwurst buffet. We then aim all of their flatulence towards the hurricane.

Nothing can withstand it. NOTHING!

Also, the fallout from the flatulence would probably destroy Florida and the Bears fans. Win/Win imo.

I'd imagine a nuke probably does have enough energy in raw terms to disrupt a hurricane but only if it's properly directed and over a massively large area. If you just let off nukes it'll send big arse shock waves through the hurricane that, from what I understand, will do sweet feth all (ie. very little) to disrupt the net movement of air.

Indeed if you add a crapload of heat energy to the hurricane you'll probably just make it worse.

Cool webby!

https://www.windy.com/?22.938,-72.510,5

Holy crap! Irma might be Cat 5+ storm!

 djones520 wrote:

 feeder wrote:
Would it be theoretically possible to build a contained continuous hurricane generator? Since a storm is essentially atmosphere+ temperature, could we potentially build a bio-dome that exists to create storm-generated energy?

Bear in mind I was seriously impressed with the human battery plant when I first watched the Matrix. Science is not my strong suit.

Yeah... Going to say no. Again, talking sheer scale here. Hundreds of miles wide, TRILLIONS of gallons of water. Hurricanes are such a humbling force of nature. There is literally nothing else on earth that comes close to them.

Volcanic eruptions can probably one-up a hurricane. The eruption of Tambora in 1815 is estimated to have been the equivalent of a 33 gigaton warhead (4,2x10^20 megajoules, compared to the 6x10^8 megajoules per second in a hurricane figure given above), causing the "year without a summer" in 1816. This is, obviously, 12 orders of magnitude more energy than a hurricane supposedly releases during a second. A hurricane isn't going to stay active long enough to catch up to 12 orders of magnitude more energy.

That's not even taking the big ones into account, Tambora is merely the biggest modern volcanic eruption. The truly big ones are too far in the past. Let's not even start mentioning meteors though, that'll just get silly.

Mt. Pinatubo's eruption was knarly... if I remember correctly, the following year cooled to 1-2 degrees centigrade.

Volcanos ain't no joke brah!

Actually, there was a theory on a way to reduce hurricane formation - they talked about it on NPR once but I haven't found it since! Had to do with placing thousands of large tubes floating in the Atlantic... I want to say Bermuda triangle type area? Anyway it sounds like I'm making this up but I swear it was on NPR

Nukes to disrupt storms? No...just God no. This is nature, welcome to it.

What problems can't be solved by dropping a nuclear bomb on them? I've seen stuff on TV where they seal volcanoes with nuclear bombs, deflect asteroids with them, maybe you could counteract earthquake or tsunami with them too! Just don't be living anywhere near where the fallout gets spread around.

They've tried several other methods in the past as well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Stormfury

And I recall they also tried with dry-ice. In general the problem is that hurricanes are VAST things and have a lot of momentum built up into them long before they become supersize and heading for land. So its a huge amount of energy to try suddenly stopping.

 Desubot wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Want to stop hurricanes from becoming ever stronger? Stop burning fossil fuels. We'd still have hurricanes though - but they'd be weaker.

The Galveston storm was a Cat 4.

Also, you are more than welcome to quit burning fossil fuels, yet I see you words on the screen which means you are an absolute screaming hypocrite surrender monkey. Where do you think the energy came from to power it? Where do you think the materials came from to make your terminal/phone?
Unless you are living like the unabomber you're part of the carbon footprint problem.

Which do you think would be more effective. Stop burning fossil fuels? Or nuke the Hurricane?

Nuke it with fossils! Think outside the box!

Why dont we just stop burning hurricanes.

Honestly

do you think todays society as it is would survive without fossil fuels?

Absolutely. and other countries are giving up the fossil fuel addictions. Iceland has powered their whole country with geothermal. electric powered transportation is getting better and cheaper. The world would also be a better place for it with cleaner air and water.

Unlike continuing down the fossil fuel path, as the earth warms up, more and more crop lands are destroyed, by flooding and droughts. can society survive the coming floods and losing costal cities to the sea? Not to mention the earthquakes and flammable water due to fraking. Nope.

Electric cars are still a debatable point when you consider components such as the batteries. That said they remove direct air pollution so I can see them being pushed for more and more; if nothing else they'll clean up urban air pollution a fair bit (so long as industry is regulated to control its emissions).

Here's an idea! Nuke a volcano to cool the earth so the hurricanes get smaller. We still get to burn fossil fuels, because the CO2 will be counteracted by the volcanic winters!

 amanita wrote:
With the impending landfall of now category 5 Hurricane Irma, I was wondering if anyone has ever thought of disrupting a major storm at sea with a nuclear device? Setting off a hydrogen bomb to one side of the storm might cause a severe braking action o to the gathering maelstrom while keeping fallout to a minimum.

Has anyone ever heard of such a proposal or are the risks just too high? It would be nice to see the destructive potential of a nuke used for something beneficial.

While it's a bad idea, fair play to you for going outside the box and really running with it.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
What problems can't be solved by dropping a nuclear bomb on them? I've seen stuff on TV where they seal volcanoes with nuclear bombs, deflect asteroids with them, maybe you could counteract earthquake or tsunami with them too! Just don't be living anywhere near where the fallout gets spread around.

Well the asteroid thing would actually work. And radiation wouldn't matter because Earth has it's own radiation shield which deals with far more radiation every day than all nuclear bombs that ever existed.

Of course you don't deflect asteroids, you break them up into smaller pieces which will cause less damage.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
What problems can't be solved by dropping a nuclear bomb on them? I've seen stuff on TV where they seal volcanoes with nuclear bombs, deflect asteroids with them, maybe you could counteract earthquake or tsunami with them too! Just don't be living anywhere near where the fallout gets spread around.

Well the asteroid thing would actually work. And radiation wouldn't matter because Earth has it's own radiation shield which deals with far more radiation every day than all nuclear bombs that ever existed.

Of course you don't deflect asteroids, you break them up into smaller pieces which will cause less damage.

Also, the whole "space is big" thing. The square-cube law is really helpful here.

Yowsa!

[IRMA] Saint Martin dans le mur de l'oeil subit les effets de l'ouragan IRMA #iram #ouragan #SaintMartin (Source : Rinsy Xieng) pic.twitter.com/e2j7e9KtOu

— RCI Guadeloupe (@RCI_GP) September 6, 2017

 Desubot wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

 Xenomancers wrote:
Want to stop hurricanes from becoming ever stronger? Stop burning fossil fuels. We'd still have hurricanes though - but they'd be weaker.

The Galveston storm was a Cat 4.

Also, you are more than welcome to quit burning fossil fuels, yet I see you words on the screen which means you are an absolute screaming hypocrite surrender monkey. Where do you think the energy came from to power it? Where do you think the materials came from to make your terminal/phone?
Unless you are living like the unabomber you're part of the carbon footprint problem.

Which do you think would be more effective. Stop burning fossil fuels? Or nuke the Hurricane?

Nuke it with fossils! Think outside the box!

Why dont we just stop burning hurricanes.

Honestly

do you think todays society as it is would survive without fossil fuels?

LOL, no.

 feeder wrote:
Would it be theoretically possible to build a contained continuous hurricane generator? Since a storm is essentially atmosphere+ temperature, could we potentially build a bio-dome that exists to create storm-generated energy?

Bear in mind I was seriously impressed with the human battery plant when I first watched the Matrix. Science is not my strong suit.

The Laws of Thermodynamics would be an issue. You're pumping a lot of energy into the water to heat it up, then not all of that energy is able to be transferred into the hurricane and then you cannot extract all of the energy from the hurricane winds, either. So at each step you are losing more and more energy.

This is pretty impressive... no?

djones... peregrine... want to comment?

Flightradar24‏Verified account
@flightradar24
Follow
More
When the weather chooses your departure path for you. #DL302 #Irma

Probably not a very pleasant ride for the passengers. But modern airliners are super durable and flexible. Here's a photo of a 787 wing stress test:


http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Boeing-787-Ultimate-Load-Wing-Test-Completed-2.jpg

 Grey Templar wrote:
Of course you don't deflect asteroids, you break them up into smaller pieces which will cause less damage.

Nope, that's backwards. Breaking up an asteroid into smaller pieces that still hit does almost nothing, you're still getting the same total impact energy. The goal with nuking an asteroid is to deflect it so that it misses entirely. If you are able to catch it far enough out it only takes a very tiny nudge to turn a direct hit into a clean miss.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 whembly wrote:
djones... peregrine... want to comment?

Not the smartest thing ever, IMO, but not suicidal. They're in the clear part between the worst of the hurricane (waiting until that clear moment to take off), and with modern weather information it's possible to stay there and get clear of the storm until/unless they can climb high enough to get above it all. But, as noted, it may not be a fun ride for the passengers (though, less bad than you might think, wind speed alone doesn't cause turbulence). The bigger factor is that it means cutting the margin for error. Say they have a major mechanical problem and have to land, but now their brief window has closed and the departure airport is under the hurricane. Out in the middle of the ocean it's going to be harder to find an alternate airport. Someone at the airline clearly decided that the risks weren't severe enough to justify canceling the flight and losing money, but I'm not sure that I'd want to be on that flight myself.