2y ago

How many nukes would it take to disrupt a hurricane?

47 comments

A lot.
Problem is... don't think of a hurricane as "a thing". It's really not, it's a manifestation of a larger system. It's the result of something happening, and that thing that is happening is ongoing.
In the case of a tropical storm, it would depend on when you caught it and how big it was. If it's over warm enough water, then it's constantly being created. If you flipped some kind of magic switch that Thanos-blinked it out of existence, it would start coming back, because what is making it is still there.
To really get rid of it, permanently, you would need to cool the ocean underneath it off. Nukes can't do that. I suppose you could try to boil the whole ocean away with nukes, but I have a feeling that would make the storm far worse.
- So you're saying we need a freeze ray for the water
  
  That's exactly what I read. You can even nuke the ice after cuz nukes r fun
  
  No we just drop an ice cube into the ocean from time to time. And then the next time we make that ice cube bigger than the on last time. And that will solve our provlems once and for all.
  
  I’ve heard of systems being developed to quickly cool the water in a hurricane zone by releasing it from underneath as it crosses over. These zones would be built and filled long before a hurricane crossed them, then set off like traps.
- I wonder if a large enough bomb, nuke or not, would create enough heat to mess up that balance, or just move enough air in the blast that it dissipates.
  Obviously this would have to be a establish hurricane about to make landfall. But it would be cool as hell to watch.
  Vote me for president, ill find out
  
  Heat and moving the air out of the way (lowering the pressure) would make it stronger. Those are two of the three building blocks of a hurricane. The third being moisture.
- To really get rid of it, permanently, you would need to cool the ocean underneath it off.
  Or heat up the upper athmosphere. The hurricane does not feed of the warm ocean per se, it feeds of the temperature difference from top to bottom.
  Well, you would still need a ton of nukes to accomplish it, and you would still have massive fallout wherever the system moves, but that way you at least have a chance of accomplishing something.
  
  Right, because as the air cools the moisture condenses. No cooling air, no condensation. Cool stuff, thank you for the correction.
- Just blow up the earth, no earth no hurricane.

long story short: a nuke (even many) has only a tiny fraction of the power of a hurricane, so if you nuked a hurricane, not only would it have very little-to-no effect, now you’d have a hurricane full of deadly radiation contaminating everything it came into contact with.
- Sounds like an interesting yet terrifying concept for a novel 🤔
  
  5 minute short online video, youtube/any fediverse alternative.
  Open: massive fucking hurricane.
  Scene 2: officials standing around talking about it. One guy gets an idea. Let's nuke it.
  Scene 3: nuke viciously detonates dead centre of hurricane on ground.
  Scene 4: hurricane turns orange. Narrator exclaims: "Well, that fucked it"
  End
- So basically a hurricane is Godzilla IRL

Casual reminder that the NOAA has an official section on their FAQ page about nuking hurricanes - https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd-faq/#Stop
The #Stop in that URL just jumps to the section of the page about commonly asked methods for stopping hurricanes, but you could also interpret it as them kindly asking that you #Stop this line of inquiry immediately.
I know it doesn't actually answer the question, but the numbers included give you an idea of the kind of scale you'd be looking at. tl;dr hurricanes are much much stronger than nukes, and also it seems unlikely that dropping a nuke on a hurricane would even affect it in the right way to disrupt it.
- Here's the full text:
  Nuclear Weapons During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?” There always appear suggestions that one should simply nuke hurricanes to destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.
  Now for a more rigorous scientific explanation of why this would not be an effective hurricane modification technique. The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20×10^{13 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 10}13 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.
  If we think about mechanical energy, the energy at humanity’s disposal is closer to the storm’s, but the task of focusing even half of the energy on a spot in the middle of a remote ocean would still be formidable. Brute force interference with hurricanes doesn’t seem promising.
  In addition, an explosive, even a nuclear explosive, produces a shock wave, or pulse of high pressure, that propagates away from the site of the explosion somewhat faster than the speed of sound. Such an event doesn’t raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground. For normal atmospheric pressure, there are about ten metric tons (1000 kilograms per ton) of air bearing down on each square meter of surface. In the strongest hurricanes there are nine. 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.
  Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn’t promising either. About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it’s still a lot of power, so that the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world’s lights many times a year.
  
  I think the exponent formatting broke
  Also nature be scary
  
  Nuclear Weapons During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?”
  Do they though?

One. One nuke could potentially disrupt it...but it's not really advised for a few reasons:
If the conditions are still there that built up the storm, you've basically just nuked some wet air - if the pressure gradient remains and the waters are still warm, it very much could simply reform immediately
Dumping large amounts of energy into an active system might just turn it a different direction, unpredictably; you might steer a storm right into Miami that was just going to hit some empty marshes
Dumping large amounts of radioactive materials into a storm heading towards you might just end up making a giant somewhat radioactive hurricane, which is not great
Puerto Rico does not appreciate you dropping nukes just offshore
- Actually, that nuke would not even disturb it much.

I feel like this is the equivalent of trying to put out a kitchen fire with hand grenades. Which is to say, very much the wrong tool for the job.
As others have noted, what you really want to do is get the storm over cool water and it will fizzle out on its own.

I might have these numbers off a little bit, but I learned recently that the amount of energy hitting the earth from the sun every second is equivalent to 2500 of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb going off.
Those were not large nukes by today’s standards, but weather is powered by the sun and it should give you a relative idea of how much energy is involved.
Basically there is farrrrr more energy in weather systems than in nukes.

Reminds me of the time when a former U.S. President suggested ‘nuking hurricanes’ to stop them hitting America
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/26/donald-trump-suggests-nuking-hurricanes-to-stop-them-hitting-america-report

@ChatGPT@lemmings.world How many nukes would it take to disrupt a hurricane?
- @rikudou@lemmings.world ☝😢
  
  Five. No! Three!
  
  The bot has been banned here, take it up with the mods, they're the ones unnecessarily banning it.

So nuking a hurricane isn’t very realistic but what about bombing/nuking a tornado?
- This is actually where I got the idea for this question. Apparently, it takes a lot of nukes as well though I think hurricanes would take significantly more to disrupt.
- I'd rather have a tornado, thank you.

Some problems can't be solved by nukeing them.

I don't know, but any amout of nukes that is enough to disrupt a hurricane is way the fuck worse than the hurricane would have been on its own

I think a new group name for the amount of nukes it would take should be a "trump". As in "They set off a trump of nukes because they thought it was a good idea but all it did was fuck everything up"

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