July 12, 2005, 10:17AM
Scientist's hurricane cure: another storm
He says creating disturbance ahead of a big system can remove its energy
By ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
The conventional wisdom for dealing with hurricanes is pretty simple: They are unstoppable, unslowable beasts.
So the best prevention is telling coastal residents where a storm will hit and letting them know far enough in advance to give them enough time to get inland.
And yet hurricane mitigation ideas, some borderline cuckoo, aren't new. Scientists and inventors have proposed ideas to slow or alter the path of hurricanes, but none have stuck. Even the government's Project Stormfury, which sought to weaken hurricanes by forcing them to drop more rain and thus release more energy, was abandoned after 20 years.
This doesn't daunt Moshe Alamaro, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a plan, and he acknowledges that it's a little bit like playing with fire.
When firefighters stop forest fires, they often start controlled fires, which burn up grass and other fuel. For hurricanes, he proposes something similar.
His plan, developed with Russian and German researchers, calls for creating tropical storms ahead of hurricanes threatening land. Such storms would feed off warm surface water, churn the ocean up, and rob the oncoming storm of fuel.
It's not as difficult or as expensive as one might think, Alamaro says. He envisions a chain of offshore barges, each topped by a ring of jet engines. Suitable engines litter bomber graveyards in the United States and Russia, he says.
When a large storm threatens land, he says, the jet engines would fire their exhaust upward, creating an updraft of warm air. This warmer air in the atmosphere could create instability in the atmosphere and eventually, clouds and a tropical disturbance, Alamaro says.
The costs mostly would be fuel to power the engines.
To test the idea, he suggests enlisting a state such as Texas to create drought-breaking rainstorms. Using it for hurricane mitigation, he admits, might take awhile. "It's a long-term proposal, not something for next summer," he said.
One problem is creating a tropical storm, only to have the hurricane veer off before arriving at the area. Another? The man-made tropical storm could itself become a fearsome beast, although Alamaro said the storms would be stirred up near enough to land that they wouldn't have time to become too powerful.
And there are the National Hurricane Center and most meteorologists, who frown on weather modification. Hurricane center officials say they're focused on understanding storms to improve predictions.
Alamaro says his plan is one step toward stopping hurricanes. "To solve a mega-problem you need to reduce it to smaller milestones," he says.
Using junked jet engines to bring rain to Texas' coast might just be one milestone. Alamaro says all he needs to try out the idea is a free-thinking wildcatter with some spare cash.
