August 27, 2025 • 36 mins
They're huge, they're deadly, but are they unstoppable? Three experts take us inside a hurricane and reveal whether we could ever stop one.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Horee Cham and today we're answering the question can you
stop a hurricane? Hurricanes are some of the most destructive
phenomena in nature. A Category four or five hurricane can
cause upwards of one hundred billion dollars in damage and
kill thousands of people depending on where it hits when
(00:23):
it reaches land. To find out if we can stop them,
we're going to talk to several experts, including someone who
flies into hurricanes for a living and a scientist who's
been tracking how these storms have changed over the last
one hundred years. So batten down the hatches and get
ready to get blown away as we answer the question
(00:44):
can you stop a hurricane? Hey? Everyone, So today's question
is a pretty tall order. As we'll learn today, the
answer to can you stop a hurricane is actually sort
(01:06):
of yes. Red lease, it's not a no okay. To
get started, we need to know what a hurricane is
so that we know what we're up against, and I
thought the best way to do that is to take
you inside a hurricane. So I found someone who is
a real life hurricane hunter, which means it's his job
(01:28):
to go into hurricanes. Here's my conversation with doctor John Zowislack,
a researcher at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration or Noah.
Thank you, doctor Zoways Slagg for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, it's great to talk to you about hurricanes here.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, describe for us what is your current job as
a hurricane hunter.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So, as a hurricane hunters, our job is take an
airplane into a hurricane. I'm at the no Aircraft Operations
Center as a flight director and meteorologist. So my job
in the airplanes is essentially helped navigate the storm, help
the pilots out and make sure the data is quality
and make sure we're getting the data to the ground.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
How would you describe what a hurricane is?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Complete chaos at times. Obviously they're very large in scale
and when you go out fly one, you can really
feel the scale of the motion, the scale of the energy.
So for us, we see them as the danger they are.
We see them for the hazards they are.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
So this sounds super dangerous.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Why do it? So?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
We often gets the question why do it? Why fly
an airplane into a hurricane? Right, We're taking a crew
into a very turbulent environment, just a little bit more
hazardous than an any pilot would do. But the reality
is that satellite they see the big scale, right, they
see the cloud field, they see where it's located. But
to actually see inside those clouds, to see the rain
field inside those clouds, and particular the winds. Winds are
(02:43):
very very hard to measure from a satellite, So the
airplane allows us to go into the storm and measure
it at that high resolution scale, both in time and space,
to really understand what's going on inside that cloud field.
Because when they make landfall, we know the impacts and
them that has on communities. Is what really motivates us
to learn more and forecast better.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Okay, I asked, doctor, is always like, how do you
actually fly into a hurricane?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
How we sample a hurricane with an airplane? First of all, No,
we have a four engine turboprop airplane called a P three.
They are our storm petting trading aircraft, so they were
built to fly low and slow and they could take
a punishing too. What we do is we'll set up
a direct path from outside the storm to the eye
to the other side, and it's a straight line, right.
The safest way to fly a storm is a straight line.
(03:32):
It's just you get in and out quickest, right.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Could you maybe describe the whole experience. You take off,
you're flying, You're approaching the storm. What do you see.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
It's just basically you start getting cloudier, You're starting to
get the rain. You might have a really strong outer band,
which is a really intense thin line of thunderstorms, and
we're gonna have to navigate through that. You just kind
of have to find the weak spot and get through
the outer band.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Okay, here I thought would be good to explain where
we are in the hurricane. You can think of a
hurricane as a giant area of circulating air. The area
is typically three hundred but sometimes up to six hundred
miles wide. And if you've ever seen a satellite image
of a hurricane, it basically looks like a giant white
cloud that is flushing down the toilet. But actually a
(04:17):
hurricane is sort of the opposite of a toilet. It's
a lot of air coming together in a spiral and
then shooting up from the center towards the sky and
then spreading out into that giant white cloud you see now.
For the first few hundred miles that you're going into
a hurricane, things aren't too bad. This part is called
the outer band, and you're basically cutting through layers of
(04:40):
rain and thunderclouds that get progressively more intense.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And then you start getting towards fifty sixty miles away
from storm, and now things start happening, right. You're encountering
more turbulence, the winds are coming up, and I always
say the biggest thing that happens is it gets really loud.
On the airplane. It's already loud enough because of the
four turboprops running on you, but once you start getting
(05:09):
the wind, you start really getting the heavy rain, so
it gets really really loud, particularly in the stronger storms.
Ending of course it's bumpy. It's kind of a roller coaster,
but you don't know what the next drop is or
what's coming up next. Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Okay. As you get closer to the center, the winds
get faster and faster, up to about seventy to ninety
miles per hour, and then when you get to about
thirty miles from the center of the storm, you reach
the final band of the hurricane. Here the winds can
reach up to one hundred and sixteen miles per hour.
(05:56):
This part, called the eye wall, is the one that
causes the most destruction when it reaches land.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The eyewall is essentially a giant rainfield that's rotating. Now
I don't want to call it a tornado, but it
has that really strong intensi so it's creating a lot
of turbulent eddies, really really intense turbulent eddies.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Well, then if you make it through that chaotic, intense,
spinning eye wall, you get to clear, calm air.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
So when you get in the eye, the rain comes down,
the winds come down, You look out the window, you're
gonna generally see a clear area. So if you ever
see the really infamous pictures or hurricanes of that clear eye,
that's what we call a stadium effect. You just emerge
into the stadium and it's clear above. Everything calms down,
and you just get this beautiful bowl of clouds. So
(07:00):
it's a true magnificent site. I mean, it's breadthaking. You
can hear audible gasps because you're going into sunlight beaming
down on you, or at night you might see the moon.
We kind of we call that sort of the Holy
Girl hurricane flying when you're in the stadium effect and
it's a full moon and you're looking at a full
moon in the clear eye of this hurricane. But as
magnificent and onspiring as that moment, there's the downside which
(07:23):
you use. You know, for as beautiful as a storm
can be, you also know the hazards the risks that
it poses because it's you know, if we're flying it,
it's all likelihood, means that it's forecast to potentially make landfall.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oh, I see. The more beautiful it is, the more
dangerous it is to people outside the storm.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Right. A lot of times that's happening because the storm
is just so intense, right, So it's a magnificent, saddling image.
It's magnificence flying that statement effect, But it's also a
bit frightening to us because you know that storm is
extremely intense.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
What got you're interested in this field in doing this?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, ask my parents. I was growing up. There's two
great gloves I had.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Flying.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Just loved when we took a vacation every summer and
flew there. But I also loved weather. My first book
I could ever read it was a meteorology book, a
weather guide. Right now, my job is to fly in weather,
so I get to work with aircraft, I get to
study the weather, so I say I am living the dream.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
You might say you're right in the eye of the storm.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, we're ring the eye of storm.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
All right. So having met someone who flies into hurricanes
for a living, the big question now was whether he
thinks we can stop a hurricane. A lot of people
are wondering but on the internet, if you can stop
a hurricane, how would you answer that question?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Scientifically? If you have to think about the scale and
the energy of a hurricane. Okay, this is a cloud
field that is several hundred miles large. A hurricane itself
will released an equivalent heat of about ten thousand nuclear bombs. Okay,
that's a lot of energy.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Okay. When we come back, we're really going to dig
into this question. We're going to talk about all the
different ways people have proposed to stop a hurricane, and
we're going to talk to different experts about whether they
think any of these ways would work. Stay with us,
we'll be right back. Welcome back. Okay. We just heard
(09:26):
a first hand account what it's like to go inside
a hurricane, and now we're going to answer the question
of whether you can stop a hurricane. To do this,
I reached out to someone who's been studying hurricanes and
storms for over thirty years. Here's my conversation with Professor
Bob Hart. Well, thank you, doctor Heart for joining us.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I'm a professor of meteorology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida,
and my research is primarily hurricanes, how they form, and
trying to help out the public with proving the warnings
and watch us.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I'll ask doctor Heart in a minute if we can
stop a hurricane. But first I thought it was important
to talk about how hurricanes form because that's going to
help us a little later. Okay, back to the conversation.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I guess we'll start with can you give us a
brief overview of how hurricanes form?
Speaker 3 (10:25):
That's an hour question right there.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Sorry, we need a whirlwind answer from you.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
They don't just appear with an eye suddenly. Usually it
takes several days for it to go from disorganized thunderstorms
in the tropics to organized thunderstorms to having an eye
could take several days to a week, sometimes even longer,
and it has a life cycle of formation and growth.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Can you maybe step us through that life cycle, like,
how do hurricanes get started?
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Well, there's not one way, and it's a big area
of debate right now.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Really, we don't know exactly how hurricanes form.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
We know so some aspects of it.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That's right, It seems we don't know exactly how hurricanes form.
According to doctor Hart, we know what the basic ingredients
are for making a hurricane, but we can't really predict
exactly when those ingredients will turn into a hurricane. Here's
how doctor Hart explains it.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
We know that you need to have some rotation in
the atmosphere, whether that's due to the Earth turning corioliss
or due to something else like a front. If you
have that, and you have a moist atmosphere and you're
over warm water, then those thunderstorms can become increasingly strong,
(11:41):
increasingly more organized. But the million dollar question that we've
been debating for quite a while now is what specifically
causes those thunderstorms to get organized and what's enough.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
When you say organized, what do you mean.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Well, if you look at a satellite image of the tropics,
you'll find that on average, thunderstorms are pretty sporadic. There's
popcorn type thunderstorms. You know, thunderstorm in one location and
then an hour away there's another thunderstorm, but in between
there's no rain or no clouds. That's not organized. Organized
would be if they grow in size and the rotation
(12:20):
that occurs causes them to continue to reform and reform
and reform so that it isn't short lived, so that
it lasts hours and hours and days and days.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Okay, here's a quick breakdown of how a typical hurricane forms.
You start with a patch of warm ocean. That's where
most of the energy for a hurricane comes from. That's
what powers the hurricane. This patch of warm water heats
up the air above it, causing it to go up,
and as it goes up, it kind of creates a vacuum,
(12:53):
pulling in more air from the surrounding area. So it's
a little like someone brought in a giant vacuum host
and started sucking air near the surface of the water. Now,
a sucker heart said, if the air has some initial rotation,
like from the rotation of the Earth, but just randomly
from the air current, that spinning will create a vortex
(13:15):
as the air gets sucked up, and sometimes the conditions
will be just right. The air will be moist enough,
and the top of the atmosphere will be cold enough,
and the wind shear will be low enough, and the
thunderstorms that are there will come together in just the
right way that it creates a complex spinning system that
(13:36):
kind of acts like a runaway, self perpetuating machine that
just gets stronger and stronger on its own, all powered
by the heat from the warm ocean.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, it's a feedback where the warming that occurs in
the column above the storm ends up leading to lower
pressure even more warming, and so it's a nonlinear feedback
that strengthening of a hurricane makes even more strengthening possible.
And the theory says that as long as you don't
(14:08):
have something getting in the way of that, like land
or cold water, the hurricane will continue to strengthen, but
it doesn't reach infinity.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
According to doctor Hart, hurricanes would continue to grow and
grow indefinitely if it wasn't for one thing friction.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
There's a reason why we have a category five as
a maximum, and that's because as it gets stronger and
stronger and stronger, and now we're talking about winds of
approaching two hundred miles an hour. The friction goes up
very very quickly with friction between what with the ocean,
so friction between the air and the ocean's while we
(14:50):
get large waves in hurricanes. So eventually that friction becomes
so strong that this hurricane cannot intensify any further.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Okay, those are the basics of how hurricanes form. Now
let's get to the main question, which is can you
stop a hurricane? All right? Now we get to the
kind of controversial part of the topic here. What are
some ways that people have said you can maybe stop
a hurricane? All right? According to doctor Hart, there are
(15:22):
three basic ways you can try to stop a hurricane.
Number one, you can mess with the way a hurricane forms.
Number two, you can try to cut off its energy supply,
and number three you can try to blow it out
of the water. We'll start with number one, messing with
how a hurricane forms.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
There were some experiments, it's about seventy five years ago now,
Project Storm Fury, where they did cloud seating of hurricanes.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
What does that mean.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
They put certain chemicals in the atmosphere in thunderstorms or
near thunderstorms to dissipate those thunderstorms. So this was like
one of the earliest tests of weather modification.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
What did these chemicals? What were they supposed to do?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
They would reduce the relative you met the air, so
the cloud would go away, or you could turn the
liquid more to ice, which changes the physics of the air.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I see. It'd be like throwing salt up into the
atmosphere to lower the freezing point. Maybe something like that.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
One way to try to mess with how a hurricane
forms is to spray the clouds in a hurricane with
basically anti freeze, or actually the opposite of anti freeze.
And this is something scientists actually tried. Project Storm Fury
was a twenty year joint project between the US Navy
(16:47):
and the Department of Commerce where they experimented with spring
silver iodide to the clouds outside the eye of a hurricane.
The idea was that the silver iodide would trigger the
moisture in those clouds to turn to ice and eventually
expand the eye wall, making it weaker. It's something that
(17:08):
actually works in a single small thunderstorm, but showing that
it works in a complex, huge hurricane is a different story.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
The results were nonconclusive, and the reason why they were
abandoned and never done again. Was because they could not
prove that there was a cause and effect there. Sometimes
it didn't have any effect, sometimes there was an intensification,
and sometimes they weaken anyway, So that experiment's never been redone.
And you're of course modifying the environment. With all this
(17:41):
junk that you're throwing into the atmosphere, you would be
dramatically hurting the oceans and us. Even if you could
get all this chemical Think about what it would be
doing to the fish, Think about what it would be
doing to the trees.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I see. So it could be an environmental disaster.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Yes, okay, without saving another environmental disaster.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Right, right, okay? What are some other ideas that people
have floated out there?
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Pumping up cold water from the deep ocean. Once you
get deep enough, let's say, beyond maybe two hundred and
three hundred feet, the ocean begins to cool and some
of the ideas are to pump up that cold water
to the surface to cool off the surface of the
ocean such that all that physics we talked about and
(18:24):
that feedback doesn't occur or shuts down.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Another idea to stop the hurricane is to shut off
the source of our hurricanes energy, which is the heat
in the ocean, presumably would deploy something like an array
of deep water pumps that go down two hundred to
three hundred meters and bring up cold water through hoses
or tubes. This could technically work, but.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
The problem is you need to cool over a large
area for one storm, and in order to cool or
for a large area, you need to drop all these
devices that we haven't even created yet, and that means
you have to fly them out there in the right location.
And of course then you also realize that, well, we
don't know the forecast of these things incredibly well, which
(19:16):
means by the time you get there that forecasts may
have changed, and now you've missed your opportunity.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
In other words, you could build this array of water
pumps and deploy them, but you need to build a
lot of them to cover a large area hundreds of
miles wide, and then you might miss the hurricane could
unexpectedly veer off and miss the area of the ocean
you were cooling off, So then you need even more
(19:45):
of these pumps. It all gets super expensive. Pumping cold
water that's also just prohibitively expensive, and you don't know
if it's going to work. Yeah, all right, what are
other ones? I've heard? Nuclear bomb?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Yeah, I've gotten those questions from the public. Those go back,
you know, twenty years when I started teaching at FSU,
before social media became a real big thing. These sort
of questions become very nice graduate school questions for candidacy
exam for PhD students to pursue their PhD, because they
(20:21):
have to go through the math of figuring out is
this feasible sort of and what are the downsides to it? Well,
all the physics that we've talked about at the beginning
of this for how hurricane strengthens and forms. That's an
incredible amount of energy, a really incredible amount of energy,
and we can generally calculate it various types of energy,
kinetic energy, latent energy, thermal energy. So we can come
(20:43):
up with an estimate of the total amount of energy
that is in a hurricane over its life. And then
you can say, okay, well, let's say we wanted to
destroy the hurricane by matching that amount of energy by
the release of nuclear weapons outside the eye and the
eye wall of the storm to disrupt it. Right, So
(21:04):
you're basically causing this disruption in the normal structure of
the system with the goal of dissipating it. Well, if
you do the math out, total amount of energy is
equivalent to basically the entire nuclear arsenal of the world.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
In other words, what doctor Hart is saying is you
could stop a hurricane by blowing it up, but you
need about ten thousand nuclear bombs, which is basically all
the nuclear bombs on Earth. That's just to stop one hurricane.
There would still be more hurricanes that season, and the
(21:41):
next year and the year after that, not to mention
the enormous mess exploding ten thousand nuclear bombs would make.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
And so even if you were to do that, we
don't know where to put them these weapons, Like where
exactly do you put them? Do you put them in
a circle outside the eye? Well, well we don't know.
In the outer part of the storm, we don't know.
And even if you could do that with phenomenal resources,
probably more resources than it would take to go to Mars,
(22:11):
you now have caused a massive environmental disaster, both in
the ocean and the air in this attempt.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Meaning you've basically radiated the entire Atlantic Ocean kind of
and the.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Atmosphere there above it, and the food, the food supply
because so much of the world's food comes from the ocean,
and the greenhouse effect that exists. Of course, because you're
modifying the structure of the ocean. It's a nightmare. The
planet would be destitute financially, resource wise.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, let's not do that, all right. When we come back,
we're going to explore this idea more, and we're going
to learn about the time when humans they have inadvertently
stopped several hurricanes. Stay with us, you're listening to science
stuff and we're back. But the people have mentioned Saharan
(23:15):
dust and wind turbines.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yes, there's wind over Africa. Those winds often carry dust
into the atmosphere of the Atlantic, and that dust changes
the physics of the atmosphere there, causes it to be drier,
causes it to be warmer. So that changes the ability
to form thunderstorms.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
So the idea to put more dust or less dust.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Well, you would want more dust in theory that would
prevent the thunder storms or decrease the likelihood of thunder
storms going all the way up in the atmosphere. But
yet again, this is a lot of dust you would
need over a large area.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
You need to be pumping dust all year over a
huge amount of space.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Yeah, I don't think a lot of the people that
live in Africa and otherwise would appreciate having enormous fans
blowing at all this dust into the Atlantic air and
also changing the surface there and probably hurting rainforests as well.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
So you could also stop a hurricane by throwing dust
at it, but again, the skills such that you need
an enormous amount of dust, how would you blow all
that dust from Africa? Okay? The last idea here is
to use a wind turbine basically a fan to try
to blow a hurricane away or at least a mess
(24:35):
with it. Okay, and then really quick wind turbines. I
imagine it's the same idea somehow you put wind turbines.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
And yeah, that was one of the emails that somebody
had tried to patent an enormous ship like device that
would basically redirect air in a hurricane, preventing it from strengthening.
And the same questions logistically come to mind is even
if you could build this in enormously expensive device, how
(25:02):
do you lift it? And if you're going to have
it floating in the water. Things that are very heavy
tend to move very slowly in the water, and by
the time you got it to where you need it,
the storm's gone formed and died somewhere else I see.
Not to mention the energetics of it. We've seen enough
examples of oil rigs and ships at sea that have
been capsized during hurricanes due to the massive waves that
(25:26):
would just probably destroy this or certainly heavily damage it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
WHOA all right, So what does this all mean for
a question today? Can you stop a hurricane? I feel
like all of these potential solutions could work if we
just crazy scale up the engineering, throw all our money
into it, not worry about environmental disaster. I feel like
(25:51):
maybe the answer can we stop a hurricane is yes,
but maybe we don't want to. Yes.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I think we could be able to stop hurricane century
from now, let's say, when we're in a very different
technological environment, ideally with a lot more resources and a
lot better understanding.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
So we might be able to stop hurricanes. But here's
the surprising part of the answer. According to doctor Hart,
we may not want to because when you mess with nature,
things can happen that you didn't expect.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
So there's also the political aspect of that that you know, Okay, well,
what if it did work and you change the path
storm if you did cloud seating, Let's say of a
hurricane that was a day or two away from one
country and you weakened it, you could change the track
slightly enough that it ends up hitting another country nearby,
(26:46):
or ends up going into a major city rather than
a rural area. And then it becomes a mess, a nightmare,
because you're going to have some stating that Okay, well
we got a hurricane with high damage that we shouldn't
have got because of the modification.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Oh, it becomes kind of like a hot potato.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Yes, yeah, I guess the best thing for me to
close in on is hurricanes themselves are a part of
the climate, just like winter storms are, just like tornadoes are.
They occur, they play a role, and usually that role
goes back to, well, it's hotter in the tropics, it's
colder in the poles, and we're trying to redistribute the heat. Well,
(27:27):
if we don't allow these hurricanes to occur, we may
get something worse, something different that we're not prepared for. Anyway.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Okay, we heard from a hurricane hunter about what it's
like to go into hurricane. We talked about a lot
of the ways humans have proposed to stop hurricanes, and
so far none of them seem to work or be
very practical. Now, does that mean we are helpless against
the forces of nature? Not necessarily. It turns out there
(27:58):
is an instance where hu may have inadvertently stopped not one,
but several hurricanes. It's something I learned when I talk
to Professor Gave Becky and I asked him how the
number of hurricanes has changed over time. Here's what he does.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
My name is Abe Becky. I'm a professor of geosciences
at Princeton University, and I do research on how climate
affects weather events, including hurricanes.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Amazing, I was wondering how has the frequency of hurricanes
changed over time?
Speaker 4 (28:35):
So the part that we can answer very clearly and
unambiguously is that over the last forty years, the frequency
of hurricanes in the Atlantic has gone up a lot.
We have satellites and those let us see hurricanes very
well over the last forty years, and we are almost
one hundred percent sure that they've increased in the Atlantic
over the last forty years.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
How many hurricanes are we talking about here per year
in the Atlantic.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
In the Atlantic, the average number of hurricanes, if you
go and you look before nineteen ninety five, that average
was much lower, as more than four, and recently that
average is eight or so. It's a substantial increase in
the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic over the last
forty years.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
All right, what doctor Vicki's saying is that the number
of hurricanes per year has been going up since the
nineteen eighties. But here's the weird part. Before this happened,
the number of hurricanes per year went down.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
So this increase over the last forty years was preceded
by a decrease over the preceding forty years. So if
you look at the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic
from World War II, or they say the nineteen thirties
to the nineteen eighties, they showed a very dramatic decrease
comparable to the increase that we've seen over the last
(29:56):
forty years.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
These changes in the number of hurricanes are significant, which
makes the question what happened and here scientists are not sure,
but there are a few hypotheses, the first being that
it's a random fluctuation of the ocean currents.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
The climate system. It sort of fluctuates on its own.
It can have time scales of decades. And in the
Atlantic there's this current it's called the Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation.
It's a mouthful. This current brings warm surface water to
the north across the Atlantic, and that current seems to fluctuate.
(30:37):
Some decades, it's stronger, some decades it's weaker. And so
one hypothesis is that those chaotic fluctuations have led to
an increase in hurricane activities. Not everything aligns with that hypothesis,
but some evidence does. Another hypothesis is one to do
with human practices. It has to do with sulfur dioxide.
(31:01):
So one of the byproducts of burning coal was emission
of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere which would undergo chemical
changes in the atmosphere and become sulfate, which you can
see it reflects sunlight and it can turn into sulfuric acid,
and this is what gave us acid rain is a
side effect of burning coal. And as there was industrial
(31:25):
development after World War two in Europe and in North America,
there was a lot of emission of sulfur dioxide. And
so between World War Two into the nineteen eighties, you
had this cloud of reflective particles building up over the Atlantic,
and they reflected sunlight and they made the Atlantic colder
than it otherwise would have been, and they sapped the
(31:48):
energy that hurricanes would have liked to have had.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Okay, what doctor Vicki's saying is that there are two
possible reasons why the number of hurricanes went down in
the nineteen eighties. One is that it's a natural cycle
of the ocean currents in the Atlantic, and the other
is that it's due to us. After World War II,
we started burning coal like crazy, and that could have
cooled the ocean and reduced the number of hurricanes. But
(32:16):
then in the nineteen eighties, when we realized all this
pollution was terrible for our health and it was causing
acid rain, which was killing all the forests, we started
putting filters in coal power plants to take out to
reflective pollution, and this ironically could have led to the
rewarming of the Atlantic and the increase in the number
(32:36):
of hurricanes per year. Now, I brought this up not
to make the point that we should go back to
polluting our air and killing our forests, but to show
that human activity does have the potential to basically stop
something as large as a hurricane. And this is important
because of climate change. Now, we don't actually know if
the number of hurricanes is going to increase because of
(32:59):
global warming. Scientists have a strong prediction that it's definitely
going to make them deadlier.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
We don't know whether the number of hurricanes in a
warming climate goes up or goes down. We know it's
possible that it might change by a considerable amount. Now,
this is where we get to the other metric, which
is intensity, and there we have a lot more consistency
(33:28):
and understanding that the peak intensity of hurricanes in a
warmer world should increase. And that's because hurricanes draw energy
from the warm ocean and the moisture, and so as
you warm the planet, you have more energy in the
ocean and the hurricanes will tap into that. So the
hurricanes that exist in a warmer world are likely to
(33:49):
have larger peak.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Intensities and therefore be deadlier. Exactly, all right, so recap,
can you stop the hurricane? The answer seems to be yes,
we can stop a single hurricane, but it would be
too expensive and unpredictable with current technology. And yes, our
actions can affect how many hurricanes happen and how deadly
(34:14):
they are. I think what's clear is that we need
more science. With more science, we could answer a lot
of these questions, and we could do a better job
of neutralizing hurricanes by being able to predict when they're
going to form and where they're going to hit where
people live. If we can do that, we can evacuate
people and prepare so that the hurricanes don't do as
(34:36):
much damage. Unfortunately, right now, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration is getting massive cuts to their budget. The Trump
administration has proposed cutting the NOAH budget by forty percent,
including killing its research division, the Office of Oceanic and
Atmospheric Research. So, if you live in Florida or tax
(35:00):
or Alabama, or North or South Carolina states that are
in the crosshairs of future hurricanes, I highly recommend you
call your elected official and let them know you oppose
these cuts because stopping a hurricane may not be practical,
but learning more about them so we can reduce the
effect is just common sense. Thanks for joining us. See
(35:24):
you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Ychm, edited
by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer
and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me on
social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name
(35:44):
of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to sign
Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be
back next Wednesday with another episode.
Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Horee Cham and today we're answering the question can you
stop a hurricane? Hurricanes are some of the most destructive
phenomena in nature. A Category four or five hurricane can
cause upwards of one hundred billion dollars in damage and
kill thousands of people depending on where it hits when
(00:23):
it reaches land. To find out if we can stop them,
we're going to talk to several experts, including someone who
flies into hurricanes for a living and a scientist who's
been tracking how these storms have changed over the last
one hundred years. So batten down the hatches and get
ready to get blown away as we answer the question
(00:44):
can you stop a hurricane? Hey? Everyone, So today's question
is a pretty tall order. As we'll learn today, the
answer to can you stop a hurricane is actually sort
(01:06):
of yes. Red lease, it's not a no okay. To
get started, we need to know what a hurricane is
so that we know what we're up against, and I
thought the best way to do that is to take
you inside a hurricane. So I found someone who is
a real life hurricane hunter, which means it's his job
(01:28):
to go into hurricanes. Here's my conversation with doctor John Zowislack,
a researcher at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration or Noah.
Thank you, doctor Zoways Slagg for joining us.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah, it's great to talk to you about hurricanes here.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, describe for us what is your current job as
a hurricane hunter.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
So, as a hurricane hunters, our job is take an
airplane into a hurricane. I'm at the no Aircraft Operations
Center as a flight director and meteorologist. So my job
in the airplanes is essentially helped navigate the storm, help
the pilots out and make sure the data is quality
and make sure we're getting the data to the ground.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
How would you describe what a hurricane is?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Complete chaos at times. Obviously they're very large in scale
and when you go out fly one, you can really
feel the scale of the motion, the scale of the energy.
So for us, we see them as the danger they are.
We see them for the hazards they are.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
So this sounds super dangerous.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Why do it? So?
Speaker 2 (02:22):
We often gets the question why do it? Why fly
an airplane into a hurricane? Right, We're taking a crew
into a very turbulent environment, just a little bit more
hazardous than an any pilot would do. But the reality
is that satellite they see the big scale, right, they
see the cloud field, they see where it's located. But
to actually see inside those clouds, to see the rain
field inside those clouds, and particular the winds. Winds are
(02:43):
very very hard to measure from a satellite, So the
airplane allows us to go into the storm and measure
it at that high resolution scale, both in time and space,
to really understand what's going on inside that cloud field.
Because when they make landfall, we know the impacts and
them that has on communities. Is what really motivates us
to learn more and forecast better.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
Okay, I asked, doctor, is always like, how do you
actually fly into a hurricane?
Speaker 2 (03:11):
How we sample a hurricane with an airplane? First of all, No,
we have a four engine turboprop airplane called a P three.
They are our storm petting trading aircraft, so they were
built to fly low and slow and they could take
a punishing too. What we do is we'll set up
a direct path from outside the storm to the eye
to the other side, and it's a straight line, right.
The safest way to fly a storm is a straight line.
(03:32):
It's just you get in and out quickest, right.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Could you maybe describe the whole experience. You take off,
you're flying, You're approaching the storm. What do you see.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
It's just basically you start getting cloudier, You're starting to
get the rain. You might have a really strong outer band,
which is a really intense thin line of thunderstorms, and
we're gonna have to navigate through that. You just kind
of have to find the weak spot and get through
the outer band.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Okay, here I thought would be good to explain where
we are in the hurricane. You can think of a
hurricane as a giant area of circulating air. The area
is typically three hundred but sometimes up to six hundred
miles wide. And if you've ever seen a satellite image
of a hurricane, it basically looks like a giant white
cloud that is flushing down the toilet. But actually a
(04:17):
hurricane is sort of the opposite of a toilet. It's
a lot of air coming together in a spiral and
then shooting up from the center towards the sky and
then spreading out into that giant white cloud you see now.
For the first few hundred miles that you're going into
a hurricane, things aren't too bad. This part is called
the outer band, and you're basically cutting through layers of
(04:40):
rain and thunderclouds that get progressively more intense.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
And then you start getting towards fifty sixty miles away
from storm, and now things start happening, right. You're encountering
more turbulence, the winds are coming up, and I always
say the biggest thing that happens is it gets really loud.
On the airplane. It's already loud enough because of the
four turboprops running on you, but once you start getting
(05:09):
the wind, you start really getting the heavy rain, so
it gets really really loud, particularly in the stronger storms.
Ending of course it's bumpy. It's kind of a roller coaster,
but you don't know what the next drop is or
what's coming up next. Wow.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
Okay. As you get closer to the center, the winds
get faster and faster, up to about seventy to ninety
miles per hour, and then when you get to about
thirty miles from the center of the storm, you reach
the final band of the hurricane. Here the winds can
reach up to one hundred and sixteen miles per hour.
(05:56):
This part, called the eye wall, is the one that
causes the most destruction when it reaches land.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
The eyewall is essentially a giant rainfield that's rotating. Now
I don't want to call it a tornado, but it
has that really strong intensi so it's creating a lot
of turbulent eddies, really really intense turbulent eddies.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:22):
Well, then if you make it through that chaotic, intense,
spinning eye wall, you get to clear, calm air.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
So when you get in the eye, the rain comes down,
the winds come down, You look out the window, you're
gonna generally see a clear area. So if you ever
see the really infamous pictures or hurricanes of that clear eye,
that's what we call a stadium effect. You just emerge
into the stadium and it's clear above. Everything calms down,
and you just get this beautiful bowl of clouds. So
(07:00):
it's a true magnificent site. I mean, it's breadthaking. You
can hear audible gasps because you're going into sunlight beaming
down on you, or at night you might see the moon.
We kind of we call that sort of the Holy
Girl hurricane flying when you're in the stadium effect and
it's a full moon and you're looking at a full
moon in the clear eye of this hurricane. But as
magnificent and onspiring as that moment, there's the downside which
(07:23):
you use. You know, for as beautiful as a storm
can be, you also know the hazards the risks that
it poses because it's you know, if we're flying it,
it's all likelihood, means that it's forecast to potentially make landfall.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Oh, I see. The more beautiful it is, the more
dangerous it is to people outside the storm.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Right. A lot of times that's happening because the storm
is just so intense, right, So it's a magnificent, saddling image.
It's magnificence flying that statement effect, But it's also a
bit frightening to us because you know that storm is
extremely intense.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
What got you're interested in this field in doing this?
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Yeah, ask my parents. I was growing up. There's two
great gloves I had.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Flying.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Just loved when we took a vacation every summer and
flew there. But I also loved weather. My first book
I could ever read it was a meteorology book, a
weather guide. Right now, my job is to fly in weather,
so I get to work with aircraft, I get to
study the weather, so I say I am living the dream.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
You might say you're right in the eye of the storm.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Yeah, we're ring the eye of storm.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
All right. So having met someone who flies into hurricanes
for a living, the big question now was whether he
thinks we can stop a hurricane. A lot of people
are wondering but on the internet, if you can stop
a hurricane, how would you answer that question?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
Scientifically? If you have to think about the scale and
the energy of a hurricane. Okay, this is a cloud
field that is several hundred miles large. A hurricane itself
will released an equivalent heat of about ten thousand nuclear bombs. Okay,
that's a lot of energy.
Speaker 1 (08:58):
Okay. When we come back, we're really going to dig
into this question. We're going to talk about all the
different ways people have proposed to stop a hurricane, and
we're going to talk to different experts about whether they
think any of these ways would work. Stay with us,
we'll be right back. Welcome back. Okay. We just heard
(09:26):
a first hand account what it's like to go inside
a hurricane, and now we're going to answer the question
of whether you can stop a hurricane. To do this,
I reached out to someone who's been studying hurricanes and
storms for over thirty years. Here's my conversation with Professor
Bob Hart. Well, thank you, doctor Heart for joining us.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
Hello.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
I'm a professor of meteorology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida,
and my research is primarily hurricanes, how they form, and
trying to help out the public with proving the warnings
and watch us.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
I'll ask doctor Heart in a minute if we can
stop a hurricane. But first I thought it was important
to talk about how hurricanes form because that's going to
help us a little later. Okay, back to the conversation.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
I guess we'll start with can you give us a
brief overview of how hurricanes form?
Speaker 3 (10:25):
That's an hour question right there.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
Sorry, we need a whirlwind answer from you.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
They don't just appear with an eye suddenly. Usually it
takes several days for it to go from disorganized thunderstorms
in the tropics to organized thunderstorms to having an eye
could take several days to a week, sometimes even longer,
and it has a life cycle of formation and growth.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
Can you maybe step us through that life cycle, like,
how do hurricanes get started?
Speaker 3 (10:53):
Well, there's not one way, and it's a big area
of debate right now.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Really, we don't know exactly how hurricanes form.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
We know so some aspects of it.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
That's right, It seems we don't know exactly how hurricanes form.
According to doctor Hart, we know what the basic ingredients
are for making a hurricane, but we can't really predict
exactly when those ingredients will turn into a hurricane. Here's
how doctor Hart explains it.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
We know that you need to have some rotation in
the atmosphere, whether that's due to the Earth turning corioliss
or due to something else like a front. If you
have that, and you have a moist atmosphere and you're
over warm water, then those thunderstorms can become increasingly strong,
(11:41):
increasingly more organized. But the million dollar question that we've
been debating for quite a while now is what specifically
causes those thunderstorms to get organized and what's enough.
Speaker 1 (11:54):
When you say organized, what do you mean.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Well, if you look at a satellite image of the tropics,
you'll find that on average, thunderstorms are pretty sporadic. There's
popcorn type thunderstorms. You know, thunderstorm in one location and
then an hour away there's another thunderstorm, but in between
there's no rain or no clouds. That's not organized. Organized
would be if they grow in size and the rotation
(12:20):
that occurs causes them to continue to reform and reform
and reform so that it isn't short lived, so that
it lasts hours and hours and days and days.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Okay, here's a quick breakdown of how a typical hurricane forms.
You start with a patch of warm ocean. That's where
most of the energy for a hurricane comes from. That's
what powers the hurricane. This patch of warm water heats
up the air above it, causing it to go up,
and as it goes up, it kind of creates a vacuum,
(12:53):
pulling in more air from the surrounding area. So it's
a little like someone brought in a giant vacuum host
and started sucking air near the surface of the water. Now,
a sucker heart said, if the air has some initial rotation,
like from the rotation of the Earth, but just randomly
from the air current, that spinning will create a vortex
(13:15):
as the air gets sucked up, and sometimes the conditions
will be just right. The air will be moist enough,
and the top of the atmosphere will be cold enough,
and the wind shear will be low enough, and the
thunderstorms that are there will come together in just the
right way that it creates a complex spinning system that
(13:36):
kind of acts like a runaway, self perpetuating machine that
just gets stronger and stronger on its own, all powered
by the heat from the warm ocean.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
Yeah, it's a feedback where the warming that occurs in
the column above the storm ends up leading to lower
pressure even more warming, and so it's a nonlinear feedback
that strengthening of a hurricane makes even more strengthening possible.
And the theory says that as long as you don't
(14:08):
have something getting in the way of that, like land
or cold water, the hurricane will continue to strengthen, but
it doesn't reach infinity.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
According to doctor Hart, hurricanes would continue to grow and
grow indefinitely if it wasn't for one thing friction.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
There's a reason why we have a category five as
a maximum, and that's because as it gets stronger and
stronger and stronger, and now we're talking about winds of
approaching two hundred miles an hour. The friction goes up
very very quickly with friction between what with the ocean,
so friction between the air and the ocean's while we
(14:50):
get large waves in hurricanes. So eventually that friction becomes
so strong that this hurricane cannot intensify any further.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Okay, those are the basics of how hurricanes form. Now
let's get to the main question, which is can you
stop a hurricane? All right? Now we get to the
kind of controversial part of the topic here. What are
some ways that people have said you can maybe stop
a hurricane? All right? According to doctor Hart, there are
(15:22):
three basic ways you can try to stop a hurricane.
Number one, you can mess with the way a hurricane forms.
Number two, you can try to cut off its energy supply,
and number three you can try to blow it out
of the water. We'll start with number one, messing with
how a hurricane forms.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
There were some experiments, it's about seventy five years ago now,
Project Storm Fury, where they did cloud seating of hurricanes.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
What does that mean.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
They put certain chemicals in the atmosphere in thunderstorms or
near thunderstorms to dissipate those thunderstorms. So this was like
one of the earliest tests of weather modification.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
What did these chemicals? What were they supposed to do?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
They would reduce the relative you met the air, so
the cloud would go away, or you could turn the
liquid more to ice, which changes the physics of the air.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
I see. It'd be like throwing salt up into the
atmosphere to lower the freezing point. Maybe something like that.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
One way to try to mess with how a hurricane
forms is to spray the clouds in a hurricane with
basically anti freeze, or actually the opposite of anti freeze.
And this is something scientists actually tried. Project Storm Fury
was a twenty year joint project between the US Navy
(16:47):
and the Department of Commerce where they experimented with spring
silver iodide to the clouds outside the eye of a hurricane.
The idea was that the silver iodide would trigger the
moisture in those clouds to turn to ice and eventually
expand the eye wall, making it weaker. It's something that
(17:08):
actually works in a single small thunderstorm, but showing that
it works in a complex, huge hurricane is a different story.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
The results were nonconclusive, and the reason why they were
abandoned and never done again. Was because they could not
prove that there was a cause and effect there. Sometimes
it didn't have any effect, sometimes there was an intensification,
and sometimes they weaken anyway, So that experiment's never been redone.
And you're of course modifying the environment. With all this
(17:41):
junk that you're throwing into the atmosphere, you would be
dramatically hurting the oceans and us. Even if you could
get all this chemical Think about what it would be
doing to the fish, Think about what it would be
doing to the trees.
Speaker 1 (17:53):
I see. So it could be an environmental disaster.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Yes, okay, without saving another environmental disaster.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
Right, right, okay? What are some other ideas that people
have floated out there?
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Pumping up cold water from the deep ocean. Once you
get deep enough, let's say, beyond maybe two hundred and
three hundred feet, the ocean begins to cool and some
of the ideas are to pump up that cold water
to the surface to cool off the surface of the
ocean such that all that physics we talked about and
(18:24):
that feedback doesn't occur or shuts down.
Speaker 1 (18:28):
Another idea to stop the hurricane is to shut off
the source of our hurricanes energy, which is the heat
in the ocean, presumably would deploy something like an array
of deep water pumps that go down two hundred to
three hundred meters and bring up cold water through hoses
or tubes. This could technically work, but.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
The problem is you need to cool over a large
area for one storm, and in order to cool or
for a large area, you need to drop all these
devices that we haven't even created yet, and that means
you have to fly them out there in the right location.
And of course then you also realize that, well, we
don't know the forecast of these things incredibly well, which
(19:16):
means by the time you get there that forecasts may
have changed, and now you've missed your opportunity.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
In other words, you could build this array of water
pumps and deploy them, but you need to build a
lot of them to cover a large area hundreds of
miles wide, and then you might miss the hurricane could
unexpectedly veer off and miss the area of the ocean
you were cooling off, So then you need even more
(19:45):
of these pumps. It all gets super expensive. Pumping cold
water that's also just prohibitively expensive, and you don't know
if it's going to work. Yeah, all right, what are
other ones? I've heard? Nuclear bomb?
Speaker 3 (20:00):
Yeah, I've gotten those questions from the public. Those go back,
you know, twenty years when I started teaching at FSU,
before social media became a real big thing. These sort
of questions become very nice graduate school questions for candidacy
exam for PhD students to pursue their PhD, because they
(20:21):
have to go through the math of figuring out is
this feasible sort of and what are the downsides to it? Well,
all the physics that we've talked about at the beginning
of this for how hurricane strengthens and forms. That's an
incredible amount of energy, a really incredible amount of energy,
and we can generally calculate it various types of energy,
kinetic energy, latent energy, thermal energy. So we can come
(20:43):
up with an estimate of the total amount of energy
that is in a hurricane over its life. And then
you can say, okay, well, let's say we wanted to
destroy the hurricane by matching that amount of energy by
the release of nuclear weapons outside the eye and the
eye wall of the storm to disrupt it. Right, So
(21:04):
you're basically causing this disruption in the normal structure of
the system with the goal of dissipating it. Well, if
you do the math out, total amount of energy is
equivalent to basically the entire nuclear arsenal of the world.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
In other words, what doctor Hart is saying is you
could stop a hurricane by blowing it up, but you
need about ten thousand nuclear bombs, which is basically all
the nuclear bombs on Earth. That's just to stop one hurricane.
There would still be more hurricanes that season, and the
(21:41):
next year and the year after that, not to mention
the enormous mess exploding ten thousand nuclear bombs would make.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
And so even if you were to do that, we
don't know where to put them these weapons, Like where
exactly do you put them? Do you put them in
a circle outside the eye? Well, well we don't know.
In the outer part of the storm, we don't know.
And even if you could do that with phenomenal resources,
probably more resources than it would take to go to Mars,
(22:11):
you now have caused a massive environmental disaster, both in
the ocean and the air in this attempt.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
Meaning you've basically radiated the entire Atlantic Ocean kind of
and the.
Speaker 3 (22:22):
Atmosphere there above it, and the food, the food supply
because so much of the world's food comes from the ocean,
and the greenhouse effect that exists. Of course, because you're
modifying the structure of the ocean. It's a nightmare. The
planet would be destitute financially, resource wise.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yeah, let's not do that, all right. When we come back,
we're going to explore this idea more, and we're going
to learn about the time when humans they have inadvertently
stopped several hurricanes. Stay with us, you're listening to science
stuff and we're back. But the people have mentioned Saharan
(23:15):
dust and wind turbines.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yes, there's wind over Africa. Those winds often carry dust
into the atmosphere of the Atlantic, and that dust changes
the physics of the atmosphere there, causes it to be drier,
causes it to be warmer. So that changes the ability
to form thunderstorms.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
So the idea to put more dust or less dust.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Well, you would want more dust in theory that would
prevent the thunder storms or decrease the likelihood of thunder
storms going all the way up in the atmosphere. But
yet again, this is a lot of dust you would
need over a large area.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
You need to be pumping dust all year over a
huge amount of space.
Speaker 3 (23:55):
Yeah, I don't think a lot of the people that
live in Africa and otherwise would appreciate having enormous fans
blowing at all this dust into the Atlantic air and
also changing the surface there and probably hurting rainforests as well.
Speaker 1 (24:13):
So you could also stop a hurricane by throwing dust
at it, but again, the skills such that you need
an enormous amount of dust, how would you blow all
that dust from Africa? Okay? The last idea here is
to use a wind turbine basically a fan to try
to blow a hurricane away or at least a mess
(24:35):
with it. Okay, and then really quick wind turbines. I
imagine it's the same idea somehow you put wind turbines.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
And yeah, that was one of the emails that somebody
had tried to patent an enormous ship like device that
would basically redirect air in a hurricane, preventing it from strengthening.
And the same questions logistically come to mind is even
if you could build this in enormously expensive device, how
(25:02):
do you lift it? And if you're going to have
it floating in the water. Things that are very heavy
tend to move very slowly in the water, and by
the time you got it to where you need it,
the storm's gone formed and died somewhere else I see.
Not to mention the energetics of it. We've seen enough
examples of oil rigs and ships at sea that have
been capsized during hurricanes due to the massive waves that
(25:26):
would just probably destroy this or certainly heavily damage it.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
WHOA all right, So what does this all mean for
a question today? Can you stop a hurricane? I feel
like all of these potential solutions could work if we
just crazy scale up the engineering, throw all our money
into it, not worry about environmental disaster. I feel like
(25:51):
maybe the answer can we stop a hurricane is yes,
but maybe we don't want to. Yes.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
I think we could be able to stop hurricane century
from now, let's say, when we're in a very different
technological environment, ideally with a lot more resources and a
lot better understanding.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
So we might be able to stop hurricanes. But here's
the surprising part of the answer. According to doctor Hart,
we may not want to because when you mess with nature,
things can happen that you didn't expect.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
So there's also the political aspect of that that you know, Okay, well,
what if it did work and you change the path
storm if you did cloud seating, Let's say of a
hurricane that was a day or two away from one
country and you weakened it, you could change the track
slightly enough that it ends up hitting another country nearby,
(26:46):
or ends up going into a major city rather than
a rural area. And then it becomes a mess, a nightmare,
because you're going to have some stating that Okay, well
we got a hurricane with high damage that we shouldn't
have got because of the modification.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
Oh, it becomes kind of like a hot potato.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Yes, yeah, I guess the best thing for me to
close in on is hurricanes themselves are a part of
the climate, just like winter storms are, just like tornadoes are.
They occur, they play a role, and usually that role
goes back to, well, it's hotter in the tropics, it's
colder in the poles, and we're trying to redistribute the heat. Well,
(27:27):
if we don't allow these hurricanes to occur, we may
get something worse, something different that we're not prepared for. Anyway.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Okay, we heard from a hurricane hunter about what it's
like to go into hurricane. We talked about a lot
of the ways humans have proposed to stop hurricanes, and
so far none of them seem to work or be
very practical. Now, does that mean we are helpless against
the forces of nature? Not necessarily. It turns out there
(27:58):
is an instance where hu may have inadvertently stopped not one,
but several hurricanes. It's something I learned when I talk
to Professor Gave Becky and I asked him how the
number of hurricanes has changed over time. Here's what he does.
Speaker 4 (28:18):
My name is Abe Becky. I'm a professor of geosciences
at Princeton University, and I do research on how climate
affects weather events, including hurricanes.
Speaker 1 (28:30):
Amazing, I was wondering how has the frequency of hurricanes
changed over time?
Speaker 4 (28:35):
So the part that we can answer very clearly and
unambiguously is that over the last forty years, the frequency
of hurricanes in the Atlantic has gone up a lot.
We have satellites and those let us see hurricanes very
well over the last forty years, and we are almost
one hundred percent sure that they've increased in the Atlantic
over the last forty years.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
How many hurricanes are we talking about here per year
in the Atlantic.
Speaker 4 (29:00):
In the Atlantic, the average number of hurricanes, if you
go and you look before nineteen ninety five, that average
was much lower, as more than four, and recently that
average is eight or so. It's a substantial increase in
the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic over the last
forty years.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
All right, what doctor Vicki's saying is that the number
of hurricanes per year has been going up since the
nineteen eighties. But here's the weird part. Before this happened,
the number of hurricanes per year went down.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
So this increase over the last forty years was preceded
by a decrease over the preceding forty years. So if
you look at the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic
from World War II, or they say the nineteen thirties
to the nineteen eighties, they showed a very dramatic decrease
comparable to the increase that we've seen over the last
(29:56):
forty years.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
These changes in the number of hurricanes are significant, which
makes the question what happened and here scientists are not sure,
but there are a few hypotheses, the first being that
it's a random fluctuation of the ocean currents.
Speaker 4 (30:14):
The climate system. It sort of fluctuates on its own.
It can have time scales of decades. And in the
Atlantic there's this current it's called the Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation.
It's a mouthful. This current brings warm surface water to
the north across the Atlantic, and that current seems to fluctuate.
(30:37):
Some decades, it's stronger, some decades it's weaker. And so
one hypothesis is that those chaotic fluctuations have led to
an increase in hurricane activities. Not everything aligns with that hypothesis,
but some evidence does. Another hypothesis is one to do
with human practices. It has to do with sulfur dioxide.
(31:01):
So one of the byproducts of burning coal was emission
of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere which would undergo chemical
changes in the atmosphere and become sulfate, which you can
see it reflects sunlight and it can turn into sulfuric acid,
and this is what gave us acid rain is a
side effect of burning coal. And as there was industrial
(31:25):
development after World War two in Europe and in North America,
there was a lot of emission of sulfur dioxide. And
so between World War Two into the nineteen eighties, you
had this cloud of reflective particles building up over the Atlantic,
and they reflected sunlight and they made the Atlantic colder
than it otherwise would have been, and they sapped the
(31:48):
energy that hurricanes would have liked to have had.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Okay, what doctor Vicki's saying is that there are two
possible reasons why the number of hurricanes went down in
the nineteen eighties. One is that it's a natural cycle
of the ocean currents in the Atlantic, and the other
is that it's due to us. After World War II,
we started burning coal like crazy, and that could have
cooled the ocean and reduced the number of hurricanes. But
(32:16):
then in the nineteen eighties, when we realized all this
pollution was terrible for our health and it was causing
acid rain, which was killing all the forests, we started
putting filters in coal power plants to take out to
reflective pollution, and this ironically could have led to the
rewarming of the Atlantic and the increase in the number
(32:36):
of hurricanes per year. Now, I brought this up not
to make the point that we should go back to
polluting our air and killing our forests, but to show
that human activity does have the potential to basically stop
something as large as a hurricane. And this is important
because of climate change. Now, we don't actually know if
the number of hurricanes is going to increase because of
(32:59):
global warming. Scientists have a strong prediction that it's definitely
going to make them deadlier.
Speaker 4 (33:06):
We don't know whether the number of hurricanes in a
warming climate goes up or goes down. We know it's
possible that it might change by a considerable amount. Now,
this is where we get to the other metric, which
is intensity, and there we have a lot more consistency
(33:28):
and understanding that the peak intensity of hurricanes in a
warmer world should increase. And that's because hurricanes draw energy
from the warm ocean and the moisture, and so as
you warm the planet, you have more energy in the
ocean and the hurricanes will tap into that. So the
hurricanes that exist in a warmer world are likely to
(33:49):
have larger peak.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
Intensities and therefore be deadlier. Exactly, all right, so recap,
can you stop the hurricane? The answer seems to be yes,
we can stop a single hurricane, but it would be
too expensive and unpredictable with current technology. And yes, our
actions can affect how many hurricanes happen and how deadly
(34:14):
they are. I think what's clear is that we need
more science. With more science, we could answer a lot
of these questions, and we could do a better job
of neutralizing hurricanes by being able to predict when they're
going to form and where they're going to hit where
people live. If we can do that, we can evacuate
people and prepare so that the hurricanes don't do as
(34:36):
much damage. Unfortunately, right now, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Administration is getting massive cuts to their budget. The Trump
administration has proposed cutting the NOAH budget by forty percent,
including killing its research division, the Office of Oceanic and
Atmospheric Research. So, if you live in Florida or tax
(35:00):
or Alabama, or North or South Carolina states that are
in the crosshairs of future hurricanes, I highly recommend you
call your elected official and let them know you oppose
these cuts because stopping a hurricane may not be practical,
but learning more about them so we can reduce the
effect is just common sense. Thanks for joining us. See
(35:24):
you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Ychm, edited
by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer
and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me on
social media. Just search for PhD Comics and the name
(35:44):
of your favorite platform. Be sure to subscribe to sign
Stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts, and please tell your friends we'll be
back next Wednesday with another episode.
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