No matter what question faces mankind, someone always answers with, “nuke it.” The Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Nuke it. Launching spacecraft to the moon? Why, there’s a nuke for that. So, why didn’t we nuke Irene? Well, rather than just dismiss the notion, the NOAA is using good ol’ science to analyze a nuclear hurricane deterrent.
It’d be easy enough to dismiss the idea of nuking Hurricane Irene in terms a layman could understand. Just talk about the danger to the populace and the environment, resulting fallout and more. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is taking it a step further however by answering the question directly: ignoring all those things, could a nuke have stopped Irene?
“The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required,” meteorologist Chris Landsea, an officer at the National Hurricane Center and writing for the NOAA, explained. “If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity’s disposal is closer to the storm’s, but the task of focusing even half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean would still be formidable. Brute force interference with hurricanes doesn’t seem promising.”
Landsea rightfully calls the idea of using a nuke or conventional explosives against a tropical storm or high-category-number hurricane “difficult to envision.”
Against a full-fledged, real-deal hurricane, the energy required “to change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a 20 km radius eye.” So, we’re talking a herculean effort.
So, what about cutting a developing hurricane off at the pass? “About 80 of these [potential hurricanes] form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop.” Well, that almost sounds like more trouble than it’s worth.
Verdict: Just like almost anything we could nuke, actually nuking it wouldn’t help things much.
See Landsea break down the finer points and the math-heavy bits here.
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