Was Category 5 Isabel destroyed by Government/private sector

[rob8303]

Was Isabel reduced from monster cat 5 winds with winds probably closer to 180 mph than 160 by government air planes and private sector methods like those employed by Dyno-storm? Or did these hurricanes just naturally weaken? I have no opinion, just trying to learn.

[Derek Ortt]

Isabel was not destroyed. The processes involved running into a hair drier aloft as well as dry air. This, in addition with siome boundary layer problems that did not allow for the usual tranfer of winds to the surface from flight level contributed to a cat 2 landfall, instead of a 3/4

[Air Force Met]

[Was Isabel reduced from monster cat 5 winds with winds probably closer to 180 mph than 160 by government air planes and private sector methods like those employed by Dyno-storm? Or did these hurricanes just naturally weaken? I have no opinion, just trying to learn.][/quote]

No...it was weakened by some stronger westerly winds and some dry air.

[cycloneye]

Dry air was the main contributor for the weakening thankfully because if that dry airmass wasn't there at that time we would see a big catastrofy in the NC/VA area much more than the 40+ deaths and over 3 billon in damages.

[Lindaloo]

It is not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

[john186292]

To study attempts...
project stormfury of the sixties..i think. Seeding. Mex banned flights, i heard, not sure if true.
///art bell guest spoke of HAARP raising ionosphere, thus altering jetstream, and sending front south to nix a storm.
....//another art b. guest, Mccanney, recently said long grounding wires would weaken storms.
..../// I favor the orbital sunshade...which IMHO could, if large enough, end all hurricanes. See my post "end all hurricanes" .
Something surely must get done in this field. We must expand our vision beyond just tracking them better. Our heads are currently in the "track only" box. Think outside the box.
John

[vbhoutex]

It is not nice to fool with Mother Nature.

I REPEAT!!!!! IT IS NOT NICE TO FOOL WITH MOTHER NATURE!!!!

I state two guarantees in life. The first is that I/we will eventually die. The other is that MOTHER NATURE WILL ALWAYS WIN!!!!!!!

[wxman57]

Ridiculous theory. I think it's pretty clear from the image below that Isabel's demise was caused by time travelers from the future. They left their calling card right there in the eye. I believe my theory is equally plausible as thinking that man could possibly influence one of these massive storms.

<img src="http://home.houston.rr.com/wx/isabelstartrek.gif">

[Stormsfury]

First of all, the Project Stormfury project was discontinued ...

Project STORMFURY was an ambitious experimental program of research on hurricane modification carried out between 1962 and 1983. The proposed modification technique involved artificial stimulation of convection outside the eyewall through seeding with silver iodide. The invigorated convection, it was argued, would compete with the original eyewall, lead to reformation of the eyewall at larger radius, and thus, through partial conservation of angular momentum, produce a decrease in the strongest winds.

Since a hurricane's destructive potential increases rapidly as its strongest winds become stronger, a reduction as small as 10% would have been worthwhile. Modification was attempted in four hurricanes on eight different days. On four of these days, the winds decreased by between 10 and 30%, The lack of response on the other days was interpreted to be the result of faulty execution of the seeding or of poorly selected subjects.

These promising results came into question in the mid-1980s because observations in unmodified hurricanes indicated:

1.. That cloud seeding had little prospect of success because hurricanes contained too much natural ice and too little supercooled water.
2.. That the positive results inferred from the seeding experiments in the 1960s stemmed from inability to discriminate between the expected results of human intervention and the natural behavior of hurricanes.

Reference
Willoughby, H. E., D. P. Jorgensen, R. A. Black, and S. L. Rosenthal, 1985: Project STORMFURY, A Scientific Chronicle, 1962-1983, Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 66, 505-514.

[Stormsfury]

Regarding some crap called Dyn-O-Gel (from AOML)

Subject: C5) Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by adding a water absorbing substance ?:
"Dyn-O-Gel" is a special powder (produced by Dyn-O-Mat) that absorbs large amounts of moisture and then becomes a gooey gel. It has been proposed to drop large amounts of the substance into the clouds of a hurricane to dissipate some of the clouds thus helping to weaken or destroy the hurricane.
At HRD we tried the one possible way that "Dyn-O-Gel" could weaken a hurricane in the MM5 numerical model. We saw an effect but it was small (~1 m/s). The argument was that the glop would make raindrops lumpy (i. e., non-aerodynamic) they would fall slower and increase condensate loading, thus weakening the eyewall updraft. If, by contrast, one increases the fall speed of the hydrometeors, the storm strengthens (again by only ~1 m/s). In the numerical experiments "decrease" meant reduce the fall velocity to half the real value, and "increase" meant double the real value. The foregoing effect is larger than anything one could hope to produce in the real atmosphere.

The observation that the experiment that Dyn-O-GelÊ conducted actually "dissipated" clouds is problematic. Did they watch any unmodified clouds ? Isolated Florida cumuli have short lifetimes, and these are just the ones an experimenter would logically pick.

Accepting for the sake of argument that they actually did have an effect, the descriptions seem more consistent with an increase in hydrometeor fall speed and accelerated collision coalescence, which the numerical model results argue would strengthen the hurricane, but not much. If this speculation proves to be correct, Dyn-O-Gel might be useful for rainmaking during a dry spell, unlike glaciogenic seeding which (in the tropics at least) tends to make rainy days even more rainy--if it does anything at all.

One of the biggest problems is, however, that it would take a LOT of the stuff to even hope to have an impact. 2 cm of rain falling over 1 square kilometer of surface deposits 20,000 metric tons (tons) of water. At the 2000-to-one ratio that the Dyn-O-Gel folks advertise, each square km would require 10 tons of goop. If we take the eye to be 20 km in diameter surrounded by a 20km thick eyewall, that's 3,769.91 square kilometers, requiring 37,699.1 tons of Dyn-O-Gel. A C-5A heavy-lift transport airplane can carry a 100 ton payload. So that treating the eyewall would require 377 sorties. A typical average reflectivity in the eyewall is about 40 dB(Z), which works out to 1.3 cm/h rain rate. Thus to keep the eyewall doped up, you'd need to deliver this much Dyn-O-Gel every hour-and-a-half or so. If you crank the reflectivity up to 43 dB(Z) you need to do it every hour. (If the eyewall is only 10 km thick, you can get by with 157 sorties every hour-and-a-half at the lower reflectivity.)"

Seems to me that this isn't very feasible anyway and probably wouldn't work for crap anyway.

SF

[Josephine96]

Don't talk about Dyno storm here.. he's a fraud lol.. all hate Dyno lol

[wxman57]

I'm sticking with my Star Trek theory....

[Derek Ortt]

Couple of things.

1. The track only box is the most absurred thing I have ever heard in my entire lifetime. Please learn about the science as to why these are caused before making statements regarding the wishes of reducing hurricanes. If you want to live on a lifeless planet, then by all means get rid of the canes. I research these at UM-RSMAS. I can tell you that they are essential and that the energy they carry from water vapor alone is emmense, mor ethan can be comprehended by many.

2. The pictures seem to be obscurring the posts. This may be my browser or may be due to the new server, that I am not sure of

[JetMaxx]

I remarked to a few of my friends and family beforehand that if hurricane Isabel indeed made a turn toward the NNW as sharply as depicted on the GFS, it would IMO severely weaken the storm.
The models were correct, and the sharp change in direction (the atmospheric conditions that caused the sharp turn) basically "shredded" the teeth of the beast....and no man had anything to do with it.

Besides, if it were a man-made event (lasers; dynostuff; etc) that weakened and turned Isabel from cat-5 to cat-2, the models would have had NO CLUE 5 to 7 days in advance. The track model guidance handling Isabel was exceptional...as accurate as I've ever witnessed.

[shaner]

Isabel was not destroyed. The processes involved running into a hair drier aloft as well as dry air.

lol. What kind of hair dryer do they use? More importantly, my wife wants to know where she can get one.

[Aimless]

(I have to have a little fun with this:)

Actually, the Klingons were the ones who initiated the original storm in an attempt to distract the government so they could land a huge invading force. (Solar powered transporters were not working due to the effects of the giant sunshades placed above the earth..) It was only through the efforts of the crew of the Enterprise and a few unusual members of Storm2K that the storm was curtailed and the invaders stopped. The enormous amount of chemicals were delivered to the storm with the assistance of WXGodzilla, USSupermanChaser, and some guy in a spider suit. The reason the models still seemed to be able to predict the storm was because "Doc" used the dylithium crystals to recharge his flux capacitor to use the time machine to go back to the future to fix the model data so we wouldn't realize what happend.
Perhaps in the future, we will acknowledge this and remember it as "Plan 9 From Outerspace."

[JCT777]

I'm sticking with my Star Trek theory....

LOL! Sounds about right to me.

[zoeyann]

Klingons my foot! It must have been the Borg

[ChaserUK]

Although I do like a bit of Star Trek, it was the turn that almost ripped Izzy apart followed by dry air well - she did not really have a chance to regain her full strength before landfall.