They called me mad...

[learnedax]

Today's (well yesterday's, but then I got sidetracked) crazy way to save the world: place enormous arrays of windmills and wave power machines across the relatively small regions that tend to develop our major tropical storms. If the power farms are large enough, and the storm development sites can be found with enough precision, we can bleed enough energy off of developing storms to keep them from being catastrophic, while generating a lot of power off the high-activity region.

It would certainly cost a huge amount of capital, but we'd be saving money on disaster relief, and the work could be done incrementally. I think the critical question is whether we can sap off enough energy to have a significant effect. All the hurricane-fighting approaches that I've looked into so far attempt to stop an already fully-developed storm, which is so much a juggernaut that we don't seem to be able to fight it. A relatively small effect, though, early enough on in the production cycle, could probably have a significant effect. And all the maps I've seen so far suggest that the channels in which the storms form are comparatively small, and very well known.

Naturally, weather is a chaotic system, so it's very difficult to predict the impact of changes. Nonetheless, of all the changes that you could make, directly bleeding kinetic energy out of the system seems like the least risky.

Comments

[komos.livejournal.com]

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, a full-blown hurricane can do a world of damage to almost anything you put in its path; that's why I was thinking along the lines of calming the build-up of winds hundreds of miles earlier, when it was not yet even a tropical storm, but merely a self-feeding cycle of turbulence.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

First off, catching the wave-power will not reduce the hurricane - the waves are a result, not a cause. And catching wave-action out in the middle of the Atlantic, where the storm forms, will not change local storm surge near the coast.

Then: a typical hurricane has a wind-power output equivalent to roughly half the current world-wide electrical generating capacity. About 1.5x10^12 Watts. Capturing a significant fraction of that energy would require facilities equivalent to a significant fraction of our current power-generation facilities.

Basically, you'd need to build a wind farm that is usually idle, but the few times a year it runs near capacity would be able to power a large chunk of the planet.

Needless to say - building that much stuff that remains mostly idle is not cost-effective.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

My understanding was that the net movement of waves was part of the formation cycle for tropical storms - if significant wave action occurs only after the storm is fully-formed, then we can disregard that aspect of the prevention.

For the other points, the windmills would be acting far out in the tropical ocean, long before the enormous wind speeds you describe build up. They would exist to calm the turbulent cycles of air so that they never get anywhere near forming into a hurricane.

Now, they might still be low output for much of the year, but tropical winds do still gust year-round, and in the late summer they'd produce a rather higher output.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

"part of the formation cycle" does not mean "part of what makes the storm happen". Waves are a result of wind pushing on the water surface.

A hurricane is a big heat engine - the cyclonic wind energy I mentioned accounts for about one quarter of one percent of the total energy of the storm. So, suck up all the wind you want, it'll just replace it from elsewhere in the system.

Major weather patterns still work on energy scales beyond the reach of mankind. And, even if you could stop it, you probably don't want to - the ecosystem as a whole depends on the dissipation and distribution of the heat that drives the storm engine. Stop the storm, and the heat stays put, and your tropical oceans cook.

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I think the comment about waves not helping is right. But absorbing wind energy should help. Also, aren't storms partly driven by warm surface water / cool atmosphere temperature differences? OTEC plants would cool the warm surface waters, and reduce the energy available to storms.

The point about the amounts of energy involved being massive is a good one too. But if we end up in a future w/ wind/solar/wave power, there will be far more wave power deployed in ten years than there is now.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I think the massive energy concerns are largely moot, because we'd be aiming to calm the formation areas for tropical storms, killing them in their infancy. How precisely we can pinpoint formation regions, and conversely how large an area we might have to cover seem like bigger questions to me (even if we only need to draw a line across rather than blanket the region).

I think that cooling a sufficiently large area of tropical surface water to prevent hurricanes has a much higher risk of side-effects that we can't adequately predict. Nonetheless, I think it could be a viable possibility.