Scientists are developing techniques aimed at taming the power of the world’s most devastating storms. The project, backed by funds from Nasa, would involve seeding clouds, coating seas with biodegradable ”slicks” and even beaming microwave radiation from orbiting power stations to slow or even halt hurricanes.
Controlling these great, rolling tempests — known as hurricanes in the Atlantic, typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the eastern Pacific — is now considered an urgent priority.
Last month, Hurricane Ivan killed more than 70 people and destroyed thousands of homes, miles of roads, swaths of vegetation and scores of hotels as it swept over Grenada, Jamaica, Tobago, the Cayman Islands, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and finally Cuba.
Three similar recent storms caused the same kind of devastation, and meteorologists predict the next two decades will see increases in numbers and severity of hurricanes. Global warming is likely to worsen the problem.
”Nothing stands in the way of hurricanes,” says Ross Hoffman, in the current issue of Scientific American. ”But must these fearful forces be forever beyond our control?”
The answer is no, he adds, for one day they could be controlled thanks to developments in computing, satellite technology and material sciences.
Backed by Nasa funds, his team of scientists at Atmospheric and Environmental Research — a research and development consulting firm — has created computer simulations of past hurricanes, including Hurricane Iniki, which caused enormous damage to the Hawaiian island Kauai in 1992, and Hurricane Andrew, which devastated south Florida in the same year.
To the scientists’ surprise, they found that by making only relatively small changes to temperatures and other meteorological variables they could induce major alterations in the storms’ paths and behaviour. Slight tinkering sent Iniki on a route that missed Kauai, for example.
”The question is: how can such perturbations be achieved?” asks Hoffman.
The team has proposed several answers. One is to coat the ocean in front of a hurricane with a biodegradable oil that would slow the evaporation of water from the sea surface, depriving the developing storm of its sustenance.
Another technique is to seed the eyes of hurricanes with silver iodide crystals, speeding formation of ice from water vapour. Spread by aircraft, these seed clouds could cause hurricanes to dissipate, although the group acknowledges that early tests have been only partially successful.
The ultimate technique would be the construction of a flotilla of orbiting power stations that would collect the sun’s rays and beam them to Earth as microwave radiation.
These satellites are considered a promising, non-polluting energy source for the future, but could also be used to heat the sea and air around hurricanes, altering their paths and dissipating their energy. — Guardian Unlimited Â