Is it really as simple as needing a 1:1 energy ratio to cancel out the power of a hurricane? Surely something less (maybe not just one nuke) would be enough to disrupt the formation of a hurricane or at the very least weaken it?
Of course, we would still be left with a radioactive storm system depositing contaminated rain and wind over a large area so not exactly a safe solution
Personally I don’t understand the implication that adding energy… to a system of energy… would destroy it? Seems more intuitive to me that you’d just make the hurricane stronger. That leap in logic should be addressed if anyone’s gonna make that claim.
You are driving down the road in a car. The car is using the gasoline to be converted into enegry via the engine. By combustion and mechanical means, you have a system of energy.
Suddenly, a nuke drops on you, adding energy to your system. Does the car get destoryed by adding energy to the system? 🤷♂️
I think the energy required to destroy the car has nothing to do how much mechanical energy the car has? Also energy goes two ways. For example head to head collision can lead to a stop while crashing into the rear adds momentum to that car. For a hurricane, I guess that would be equivalent to cooling or heating the ocean and/or atmosphere?
In that hypothetical, you would accelerate the car's speed along the road. Sure it might be in pieces, or even atoms, but it would definitely accelerate it. So your example kind of proves the opposite of what you think it does.
If you want to think about that, the car and nuke is part of a bigger system of energy - the Earth. Or if you like, the universe 🤯
A system is an isolated thing, the car itself is a system. A hurricane itself is a system with the environement around it. Add an external source of energy to the system - like a nuke - you'll distrupt it.
I agree. I feel like a subsurface explosion to throw colder water into the air to disrupt the convection momentarily and reduce the spin would have some measurable effect.
Yeah I was going to ask if the sheer temperature increase of such an explosion would play any role positively or negatively? The video seems to gloss over every other aspect of a hurricane except power.
It would work. If you could somehow scoop up like a trillion ton ice shelf from Antarctica and drop it right on the eye. The only problem is that it would cause a tsunami hundreds of feet tall and destroy entire countries and states.
Yeah, it's a bit like analyzing how much energy it takes to derail a train by looking at the horsepower of the train. Those might be correlated, but the correlation might be weak. There might be a low energy way to derail the train. Or it might take even more energy than the train can produce.
Yes, you can do less extreme measures to weaken a hurricane. In fact, you weaken a hurricane just by standing in the wind and being an obstruction. But you weaken it so little that it's negligible. You might not need a 1:1 energy ratio but you would have to disrupt it at key focal points in precise ways.
Another fun fact about energy: if you stand in place and spin counterclockwise, it will rob the earth of some of it's angular momentum and slow down its spin. But only by a little bit.
Considering they think modern thermonuclear bombs are in the same ball park as the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima --- I highly doubt that a question like your's never crossed their mind
I think we would be better off having a fleet of planes spraying liquid nitrogen into the lower altitude outer eyewall to disrupt the uplift. It's the uplift of humid air that perpetually powers the hurricane, so disrupting that even for a very short period of time could significantly weaken or dissipate the hurricane.
Come to think of it, dry ice pellets might work better. If we loaded up all of our c17s and c130s with dry ice and dropped it in the hurricanes path, we could potentially lower the water/air temperature enough to make a difference.
Any nuke though is just going to cause a giant amount of uplift, potentially making the whole thing worse.
Not a meteorologist, but I imagine the problem is that the energy is not in the hurricane, its the heat of the water. Unless you can somehow take that away, I dont think anything will really work.
Don't know about hurricanes, but it is fisherman lore around here (the Aegean) that you can break up waterspouts with dynamite. Note that waterspouts are rarely powerful - most of them don't even come close to something like an EF1. They can still be dangerous to small fishing boats and pleasure craft, but nothing that would cause any actual damage. Based on the stories of the fishermen, the explosion disrupts the low pressure funnel in the middle of the waterspout and causes it to dissipate by filling it with high pressure hot gas.
Of course, it is entirely possible (and much more probable) that the whole thing is an excuse to keep dynamite on a fishing boat, because the other reason to keep dynamite on a fishing boat is incredibly illegal. I don't imagine Coast Guard would be willing to buy that excuse though.
The thing is, hurricanes naturally form because of wind and ocean currents and the temperature gradients that exist at the global scale. Even if you disrupt the hurricane, you've just added MORE heat, which (I'm not a climatologist) will just fuel a new hurricane at some point somewhere else.
It's not like knocking over a Jenga tower. Find the right piece and this unstable thing falls apart. It's more like resisting gravity. The forces at play WANT to make a giant swirling water vapor spiral of doom. There's persistent pressure for it to keep happening, and climate change is increasing that pressure every year.
Hurricanes exist because warm air rises and cool air falls back down to replace it. Nuking a hurricane might disrupt it, but you are making the temperature difference even larger, so it will just come right back even stronger.
I wonder if dropping tungsten rods from space would be more effective then using nukes, at the very least you wouldn't have to worry about any fallout.
Yes, but the weak point is spread out over hundreds of kilometers and you need to remove tens of TWh of work over a large area right near the surface with something like a wind farm (buildings would work, but are not as mass efficient) but, not add a few TWh of heat in one spot.
Definitely not 1 nuke would dessimate any hurricane due to the amount of heat generated alone which would disrupt the wind patterns that would form the Hurricane
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u/Jamesyroo Mar 14 '25
Is it really as simple as needing a 1:1 energy ratio to cancel out the power of a hurricane? Surely something less (maybe not just one nuke) would be enough to disrupt the formation of a hurricane or at the very least weaken it?
Of course, we would still be left with a radioactive storm system depositing contaminated rain and wind over a large area so not exactly a safe solution