Preventing Hurricaines

Dynomat corporation has developed a very absorbant powder which they have proven that if it dropped into clouds, it will dry them out.
You can research dynomat on metacrawler search engine and read about their weather modification research.
I think that this powder could be dropped into the clouds at one end of a tropical depression, before the circulation closes, and dry out one end of the tropical depression. This would prevent a circulation from forming and prevent it from becoming a tropical storm. That would prevent hurricaines from occuring.
Planes could be stationed, in hurricaine season, on an island off the coast of Africa and in the Carribean, to be ready to seed the tropical depressions as they are forming, and prevent them from becoming tropical storms.
This may only need to be done 10 times or less, each hurricaine season.

 

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That sounds a little far-fetched to me. It would probably take tons and tons of any kind of absorbant to accomplish somethinglike that.

It's also interesting that Google has never heard of them.

 

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Many years ago today, I lived in Gainesville,Florida and was hit dead center bullseye by, I think I remember correctly, No. 1 September. Slightly before names. Called herry(as in scary)canes by Gainesvillains.

I would be very glad to see them controlled. They are great big things, don't we agree? Where can we see a reliable estimate of how many gillian ( X-Files fan ) tons of powder per 'cane? :bugeye:

 

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http://www.dynomat.com/storm.shtml

Click on the research projects section also. There might be more details there.
They said they cut a cloud in half with a crop duster. Interesting.

 

The trouble is that their whole basic premise is flawed.

No, it isn't. This is not true.

http://www.fema.gov/hazards/hurricanes/whatis.shtm

A hurricane is an entire weather system all to itself; it's not composed of disparate elements.

A hurricane is a tremendous weather engine powered by the sun and by the Earth's rotation. It doesn't break up into separate thunderstorms that you can "pop" one at a time. It's being driven by the entire weather system of the North and South Atlantic, not to mention the North American and African continents. It's just too big to "spike" by dropping stuff into a few clouds.

Only someone who didn't really understand "about" meteorology and weather would characterize a hurricane as "a collection of thunderstorms".

Now, it is true that the very earliest stages of a tropical depression, called the "tropical disturbance" stage, CAN be characterized as a "collection of thunderstorms". However, a tropical disturbance is not the same thing as a hurricane. Dynomat isn't talking about getting out there and stopping a simple tropical disturbance; they're talking about stopping a full-fledged hurricane. But by the time it's a "hurricane", it's got too much energy to be capable of being stopped by merely breaking up a few clouds.

The very small cloud that they broke up on radar was what's known as a "daytime heating" cloud. It's just basically a collection of evaporated water, formed when the sun heats up the earth's surface, what make up those pretty puffy white clouds you see every afternoon in Florida.

 

That is sure True

 

What Iris said (above) is quite correct and the problem they would face goes even far beyond that in terms of costs, logistics, and practicality. Another thing is certain; if they intended to continue their experiments, they will have to bear the full costs - the government will give them nothing.

Ok, let's look at the rest of the problems, some of them anyway. First, their absorbent powder is really nothing new. In fact, I have a small cannister of it sitting on top of a bookcase here in my study. It was developed by a chemist I used to work with who had the hopes of using it in agricultural applications.

It's an organic polymer that seems to match theirs in that it also will absorb about 2,000 times it weight in water. And you need to keep this in mind - it weighs almost nothing itself, so we aren't talking a tremendous amount of water here. A 55-gal drum of the stuff, excluding the weight of the drum, weighs about 22 pounds. You'll also find it in many commercial and consumer items. It's the active part of many brands of baby diapers, women's sanitary napkins, and mats and pads for cleaning up industrial spills - oils and other chemicals.

If it required $40,000 worth, as they said, to remove the single cloud, it would probably require $500,000,000 to do their "pie cutting" action on even a very small tropical storm. And they would have to catch it just off the western coast of Africa while it was very, very small. Even at that stage they are a few hundred miles across and would require a good-sized fleet of planes to do the job before it grew larger.

Now. Let's be generous to them and assumed it worked (which is still very doubtful). They've actually managed to kill the storm and it hasn't regenerated (which it probably would!).

How do we know that we've even stopped what would have been a hurricane that posed any danger? We wouldn't. Many of them are destroyed evey year by horizontal wind shear before they ever reach hurricane strength. And since it's common for a high-pressure cell to slide to the southeast across the country, many are turned away into the cold waters of the North Atlantic where they naturally die.

So, again assuming it could even work, just how many billions of dollars would we want to spend on such an effort every single year to stop every single potential hurricane?