Beth
10-03-2004, 07:03 AM
I was reading the latest SciAm (http://www.sciam.com) today. In it, there was an article on controlling hurricanes. (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=000593AE-704B-1151-B57F83414B7F0000) I found it utterly fascinating and it is a rather relevant subject to those of us live in parts of the U.S. that are subject to the storms.
Every year huge rotating storms packing winds greater than 74 miles per hour sweep across tropical seas and onto shorelines--often devastating large swaths of territory. When these roiling tempests--called hurricanes in the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific oceans, typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean--strike heavily populated areas, they can kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of property damage. And nothing, absolutely nothing, stands in their way.
But must these fearful forces of nature be forever beyond our control? My research colleagues and I think not. Our team is investigating how we might learn to nudge hurricanes onto more benign paths or otherwise defuse them. Although this bold goal probably lies decades in the future, we think our results show that it is not too early to study the possibilities.
To even consider controlling hurricanes, researchers will need to be able to predict a storm's course extremely accurately, to identify the physical changes (such as alterations in air temperature) that would influence its behavior, and to find ways to effect those changes. This work is in its infancy, but successful computer simulations of hurricanes carried out during the past few years suggest that modification could one day be feasible. What is more, it turns out the very thing that makes forecasting any weather difficult--the atmosphere's extreme sensitivity to small stimuli--may well be the key to achieving the control we seek. Our first attempt at influencing the course of a simulated hurricane by making minor changes to the storm's initial state, for example, proved remarkably successful, and the subsequent results have continued to look favorable, tooIt seems awesome to me what we may be capable of. I once saw the sciences as the doom of us the would rush in the tribulation, but now I can see that the human mind is so truly beautiful and capable of preserving the human race.
I can only speculate what marvels my great grandchildren will once day see come to fruitation.
Every year huge rotating storms packing winds greater than 74 miles per hour sweep across tropical seas and onto shorelines--often devastating large swaths of territory. When these roiling tempests--called hurricanes in the Atlantic and the eastern Pacific oceans, typhoons in the western Pacific and cyclones in the Indian Ocean--strike heavily populated areas, they can kill thousands and cause billions of dollars of property damage. And nothing, absolutely nothing, stands in their way.
But must these fearful forces of nature be forever beyond our control? My research colleagues and I think not. Our team is investigating how we might learn to nudge hurricanes onto more benign paths or otherwise defuse them. Although this bold goal probably lies decades in the future, we think our results show that it is not too early to study the possibilities.
To even consider controlling hurricanes, researchers will need to be able to predict a storm's course extremely accurately, to identify the physical changes (such as alterations in air temperature) that would influence its behavior, and to find ways to effect those changes. This work is in its infancy, but successful computer simulations of hurricanes carried out during the past few years suggest that modification could one day be feasible. What is more, it turns out the very thing that makes forecasting any weather difficult--the atmosphere's extreme sensitivity to small stimuli--may well be the key to achieving the control we seek. Our first attempt at influencing the course of a simulated hurricane by making minor changes to the storm's initial state, for example, proved remarkably successful, and the subsequent results have continued to look favorable, tooIt seems awesome to me what we may be capable of. I once saw the sciences as the doom of us the would rush in the tribulation, but now I can see that the human mind is so truly beautiful and capable of preserving the human race.
I can only speculate what marvels my great grandchildren will once day see come to fruitation.