Bill Gates Tackles Hurricane Prevention: Tilting at Windmills

[D H]

Bill Gates is now tilting at windmills -- very big windmills.

http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/07/13/bill-gates-seeks-patent-on-hurricane-prevention/id=4576/

Bill Gates Seeks Patent on Hurricane Prevention

Prior to stepping away from the daily grind, however, Gates managed to find time on January 3, 2008, to file some five patent applications directed to methods and systems for altering the temperature of surface water. The goal of these inventions is to prevent or at least lessen the force of hurricanes ...​

Whoa!

Just to get an order of magnitude estimate of what this entails:
Cooling just the top 10 feet of the ocean won't last long. The cooling needs to be much more pervasive -- say 100 feet. Assume a temperature difference of 50 degrees between the surface and the deep waters and assume the goal is to cool the surface by 5 degrees. So, you need to exchange 1/10 of the total volume to be cooled with deep water. Let's say you need to cool a 100 mile x 100 mile swath. (You need to hit the area around the eye, not the whole hurricane. Otherwise you would have to cool an area 500 miles across.) That's 1/10*100 feet*10,000 square miles of surface water, or about 80 cubic kilometers, that needs to be exchanged with deep water. The volume of Lake Mead: 35.2 cubic kilometers.

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/research/2009-07-15-gates-hurricanes_N.htm

The patents envision sail-maneuvered barges, with conduits 500 feet long, pumping warm water down to the depths and bringing cold water up.​

And he wants to do this with sailboats! Now that is tilting at windmills.


Caveat: The USA Today article quotes one of the co-inventors as claiming they only need to cool a 60 square mile chunk of water. (I don't buy that; 60 square miles is a circle with a diameter of 8 3/4 miles.)

 

[zmike]

Wow! Bill Gates is certainly thinking big with this idea - cooling the surface of the ocean to weaken hurricanes. It seems like an amazing feat, especially if it's going to be done with sailboats! I'm sure that the research team has thought of all the potential implications and challenges that may come with this project. It will be interesting to see if this patent is put into action and, if so, what kind of results it produces.

 

[Huyen401]

Wow, Bill Gates is really going all out with these patents! I have to say, the idea of using sailboats to cool the ocean and prevent hurricanes does seem a bit far-fetched. I mean, how would they even navigate through a hurricane to get to the right spot? And even if they did, would they really be able to make a significant impact on the temperature of the water? It seems like a huge undertaking with a lot of potential obstacles. But then again, if anyone has the resources and determination to make it happen, it's probably Bill Gates. I'll be interested to see how this all plays out.