Sandy, the Frankenstorm, may be nearly history, but the hurricane season is just hitting its stride. We’ve got until November 30, after all, to keep the hatches battened, and it’s anyone’s guess what kind of dervishes the mid-Atlantic will be cooking up and slingshotting counterclockwise at our eastern flank. Can they be stopped? Tactically dissipated?
We used to think so. The Navy and Air Force began flying reconnaissance missions into tropical cyclones in 1944 to warn the public and military alike of incoming typhoons and hurricanes. About a decade later, Congress authorized funding for the United States Weather Bureau to establish the National Hurricane Research Project to improve our scientific understanding of these phenomena enough to tighten our forecast modeling. And it was here that we started drawing up some real batshit cyclone-control schemes, like chilling the ocean with either cryogenic materials or icebergs, or manipulating a hurricane environment’s radiational balance by using carbon black to absorb sunlight. Or maybe we could rid ourselves of the storms by using massive fans (seriously) to blow them back out to sea, by H-bombing the bastards to high hell or by flying straight at their hearts, pulling up just shy of the eyewall – a loop of intense storms and winds that surrounds the otherwise tranquil eye – and seeding the clouds with silver iodide. Whatever it would take.
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None of these techniques work. But the last, a white-knuckled, joint Navy-Weather Bureau-National Science Foundation venture dubbed Project STORMFURY, was probably the closest we’ve ever come to taming tempests.
A-3B Skywarrior, 1963 (Photo: US Navy/DOD)
STORMFURY was formally organized in 1962. An A-3B Skywarrior’s August 23, 1963, run into Hurricane Beulah piloted the initiative, and seeding modifications would be attempted in three more hurricanes over seven separate days. Four of these days reported decreased winds between 10 percent and 30 percent. The project eventually got the axe in ’83, though, after these maybe-semi-promising results were debunked. Damn.
But in the beginning (and in theory), at least, the science behind STORMFURY seemed to make sense. Scattering silver iodide, it was argued, would artificially stimulate convection beyond the eyewall by freezing supercooled inner-cloud water. The invigorated convection would oppose the original eyewall, effectively reforming the eyewall with a much larger perimeter. Via partial conservation of angular momentum, then, this would cut back on a storm’s more ferocious winds.
STORMFURY inside tropical storm Dorothy, 1970
It’s said Fidel Castro accused American STORMFURY scientists of weaponizing hurricanes into great, counterrevolutionary instruments of war. But what brought it all down was our own observations of unmodified hurricanes. Turns out seeding has no hope of deadening hurricanes because these sorts of mega-storms have an abundance of natural ice and a dearth of supercooled water. What’s more, those maybe-semi-promising data were the result of our inability to distinguish between the results we were expecting from the natural tendencies of cyclones. Bust.
They sure don’t name ’em like they used to, though.
A version of this article ran August 31, 2011
Top: Inside a STORMFURY aircraft (via NOAA Central Library)
Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson
