Can explosives blow apart a hurricane/cyclone/typhoon

[vh]

started so the other thread wouldn't be derails..oops too late.

How it could work:

-An airburst on top of storm to heat up cool air.
this would heat up the cold air being brought down in a cycle
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Hurricane_profile.svg
and cause it to...reverse? do something bizzare?

required energy to heat 2km high, 1000km diameter hurricane (very large). by 10 degrees. is 3*10^19 joules. compensating for a 50% effecient nuke and uneven distribution, we up that to 5*10^20 joules which is 5 kilograms of antimatter...currently thinking of a better way to output that energy



Why it wouldn't work:

[atomic7732]

If you could generate wind shear that'd be the most effective way other than cooling the water below.

[smjjames]

Why it wouldn't work:

You would be detonating a nuke, theres all kinds of problems with just detonating one. Radioactive fallout for example, and using a nuke several times a year....

[vh]

explosives does not specify nukes
it could be antimatter bombs, or maybe a "clean nuke" which uses a lead jacket to absorb radiation from fusion (the main problem with these is the radiation from the fission reaction that starts the fusion) however, this can be eliminated by using a laser module.

[smjjames]

Well, a nuke is the most powerful explosive we have, it would take tons of any other material just to equal the power of a nuke.

[vh]

a supernova explodes... 10^44 joules in a split second

since when did we fixated on the idea of nukes

[FiahOwl]

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[vh]

supernova=explosives
nuke=explosives

[vh]

"Enough of that...what mathematical formula are you using to determine the amount of energy required to heat a 2km by 1000 km section of atmosphere to the point that it would dissipate a hurricane?"

http://www.universetoday.com/8361/taking-the-temperature-of-a-hurricanes-eye/

Ok from that article, you can see that the temperature difference from the hottest to coolest point is around 21 fahrenheit. Hurricane functions on temperature differences, so heating up the top of the hurricane to eliminate that will wreck the convection currents.

21 fahrenheit=around 10 Celsius, a round number to work with

largest hurricane, igor or ivan or whatever was 1,200 km diameter. i'll assume 1,000 km diameter in these calculations. With a cylinder of 500km radius and 2km height i got approximately 1,500,000 km^3 volume (wolfram alpha). The specific heat of air water vapor is about 1.8j/kg which i rounded to 2. The density of water vapor is 0.6kg/m^3 which meant 9*10^17 grams (rounded to 10^18) and 2*10^18 joules to heat 1 degree. So 2*10^19 joules to heat 10 degrees. I took into account that bombs or any method wouldn't heat the atmosphere evenly, so i multiplied that by 10 to 2*10^20 joules and doubled it because only 30-50% of an atomic bomb goes to thermal energy. so 5*10^20 joules.

What was your question about antimatter. It doesn't really matter. a 3,000 km radius frensel lens and 3 hours of sunlight should do the same thing quite nicely.

[atomic7732]

igor

In the Atlantic ocean. Tip was much larger.

[smjjames]

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 (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.

Guess what else would wiegh a half a billion tons? An asteroid maybe a mile wide. Do you really want to smack something like that into the Earth? While it won't cause an extinction event, it will cause huge tsunamis or if it misses the target, vaporize a city.

The mile wide asteroid is a rough guess since a search for a billion ton asteroid came up with a mention of one that was three miles wide.

[vh]

you're doing it wrong

if you look at the above calculations like phinehas has. (no pun intended). you'll see that the idea is not to equalize the pressure. The idea is to heat up the air so that the system which keeps the pressure unequal breaks down. Of course a brute force measure won't work.

[smjjames]

Actually, wouldn't chilling the air work better? Hurricanes feed off the warm air coming off the ocean.

Anyways, for relevant facts, http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5g.html , theoretically, it's doable, but there are so many factors and so many ways for things to go wrong.

Either way, the energy involved is massive and the resources involved would be huge as well. Not to mention extremely costly.

Right now, with the technology that we have, the most cost effective way would be to simply prepare against them, build things to code, heed evacuations, etc.

[vh]

yeah i've seen that. It's correct, but it's assuming a brute force approach

and unfortunately, explosives tend to heat rather than cool...i suppose if you built a fleet of several million tugboats and hauled the arctic into the gulf of mexico....maybe if you somehow could blow the atmosphere up, and gt a comet through...that would definetely do it.

but so can explosives, nothing at the scale we have would do it, but it's certainly feasible in the near future, only 5 kilograms of antimatter needed. or a frensel lense a couple hundred kilos in diameter

[atomic7732]

Right now, with the technology that we have, the most cost effective way would be to simply prepare against them, build things to code, heed evacuations, etc.

I was hoping the discussion wouldn't come to real-life applications of weakening tropical cyclones. For one, a tropical cyclone's sole purpose is to transfer solar energy from the equator to the poles which obviously don't get as much. A way of earth keeping balance, entropy. Mother Nature wants them to do that and if we hinder "her" trying to do that, "she" will just send a much larger storm that we won't be able to stop... And it might not be out to sea. Not to mention that would knock some things that were working just fine off kilter, so to speak.

Tropical cyclones aren't the only weather disaster, you don't hear people talking about stopping the monsoon or nor'easters. Why not?

[vh]

...ok i'll start calculating how to blow apart a monsoon tommorow.

[smjjames]

Not to mention that we are already messing with things we don't fully understand.