Hurricane reduction through ocean surface cooling

Join the discussion
Ask a follow-up here, or get your own question answered by working scientists, mathematicians and engineers — people, not an autocomplete.
Real named experts · corrections over time · the nuance an AI answer skips
5 replies · 4K views
alchemical
Messages
4
Reaction score
0
Old article: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates.gray/

What do you guys think? Where do you see this project going? The official word is that it's not being publicly funded. But if there was even a 10% chance it would work, I see governments lining up at the possibility to control weather. To save billions of dollars in damage from weather. To use the weather against enemies.
 
Earth sciences news on Phys.org
That is what the hurricane is for. To cool the ocean.
 
alchemical said:
Old article: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates.gray/

What do you guys think? Where do you see this project going? The official word is that it's not being publicly funded. But if there was even a 10% chance it would work, I see governments lining up at the possibility to control weather. To save billions of dollars in damage from weather. To use the weather against enemies.
I see it going to the same place as the project to build 1000 meter tall walls across the Midwest to stop tornadoes.

This article doesn't explain how these "magic conduits" push warm surface water down and bring colder, deeper water up from the bottom. Plus, to be effective at stopping the damage from a hurricane, the barges would have to be moored 100-200 miles offshore, which is all deep water. Not a place where mooring a vessel is economical.

And then the environmental types would grow concerned that all this colder water near the surface would damage the marine life which normally lives in the warm surface water. When communities wanted to put LNG gasification facilities offshore, that was the objection raised: that the heat extracted from the surrounding water used to gasify the LNG would disrupt the ecosystem, even though the affected area was limited and the temperature was reduced in this zone only a few degrees.
 
Vanadium 50 said:
they turn this thing on and it ends up hitting Miami,

Or New Orleans.