http://www.usatoday.com/weather/research/2009-07-15-gates-hurricanes_N.htm The way that hurricanes work, inasmuch as I understand it, relies on warm surface water temperatures, which are greater than 80 F (~28 C) in the late summer: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003300/a003357/ The obvious thing to do, then, is to cool the surface temperature of the ocean in the hurricane's path. The question is, how much cooling do we need? Based on experience, there are very few strong hurricanes in June, when the surface temperature is 25 C or so (see above link). Hurricane force winds typically reach out to about 100 miles, so let's call it 200 km to be safe. Based on the above, I assume that we need to cool 100,000 square kilometer patch of the ocean by 3 C by pumping up cold seawater. Now it just turns into a calculus problem to see how much it would cost to bring that much seawater up from the depths. The calculus will come in because it is more expensive to bring water from a greater depth, but you have to use less of it. Then, one should compare this cost to the projected damage of a hurricane if it makes landfall. Either way, does this sound feasible? My guess is yes, as the cost of Hurricane Katrina was something like $80 billion.
Cooling just the top 10 feet of the ocean won't last long. The cooling needs to be much more pervasive -- say 100 feet. Assume a temperature difference of 50 degrees between the surface and the deep waters and assume the goal is to cool the surface by 5 degrees. So, you need to exchange 1/10 of the total volume to be cooled with deep water. Let's say you need to cool a 100 mile x 100 mile swath. (You need to hit the area around the eye, not the whole hurricane. Otherwise you would have to cool an area 500 miles across.) That's 1/10*100 feet*10,000 square miles of surface water, or about 80 cubic kilometers, that needs to be exchanged with deep water. The volume of Lake Mead: 35.2 cubic kilometers. He needs to exchange two Lake Meads worth of water. With sailboats. That is tilting at windmills! I think perchance Bill took one too many draughts from his hi tech beer cooler. http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...912".PGNR.&OS=DN/20090145912&RS=DN/2009014591 Caveat: The USA Today article quotes one of the co-inventors as claiming they only need to cool a 60 square mile chunk of water. I don't buy that; 60 square miles is a circle with a diameter of 8 3/4 miles.
Great!. So you wipe out a hurricane that would of hit the US, and in the process kill a whole host of marine life, upset weather patterns worldwide and potentially start another war elsewhere in the world because of the butterfly effect causing floods there. Not such a great idea. Incidentally while England is renowned for it's "Four seasons in one day" weather, I and my country would prefer it, if you didn't start messing with the Gulf Stream since we do occasionally like to see a season with a bit of sunshine in it since the other 9 months of the year are cold drab and dreary. To be honest, you'd be better off putting more trees around strip malls.
It would be far better to launch a concave mirror into orit above the earth and then reflect the suns energy in a concentrated way at the cloud tops. If you heat the cloud tops, opisite cooling the water , then you can accomplish the same thing far easier.:itold:
As clouds rise the become colder and if you prevent them from getting colder you can prevent them from getting higher and stronger. If a cloud losses temperature as it gains altitude then it would seem that it should be able to be stopped rising by heating it up more.
Nope, the temperature goes down as the height rises. by catching the hurricane as it starts to grow is the best way to prevent it from forming into a large hurricane. By stropping the clouds from rising that does the job very well.
I guess it's just a matter of figuring out which is cheaper---putting all of this infrastructure in place, or having a Cat 4 storm hit (say) Houston or Miami or New Orleans again. It sounds pretty ludicrous, but so did JFK's directive of going to the moon in 1961. The eye of the hurricane is 100 miles across, I thought. So you don't even need to cover the eye? Sounds like an underestimate. I think that one little patch of cold water in the open ocean won't affect marine life that much. And, if the co-inventors are correct (as DH points out), then a 60 sq. mile patch of cold water will do nothing to the Gulf Stream, so your summer sunshine will probably be ok Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Hmm...didn't you ever see that episode of Futurama? http://www.tv.com/Futurama/Crimes o...481/recap.html?tag=content_wrap;episode_recap See the 9:30 - 10:30 mark of the first video in this link: http://video.google.com/videosearch...nt=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wv#
I think its a multiple order of magnitude underestimate. 60 square miles is a circle about 8 [sup]3[/sup]/[sub]4[/sub] miles across. A small island. Large hurricanes wipe small islands out and continue on unabated. Cuba slows hurricanes down. I like your 100 miles × 100 miles figure much better. Note that this is still small compared to the size of a large hurricane, which can cover 100,000 square miles.
Yeah it does sound too small, but I would hope that Gates and his co-inventors actually did some calculations.
I suspect they sampled a bit too much from Bill's hi tech beer cooler. It's just a bunch of silly patents for pumping water from the deeps. Whether the patent will actually work to stop hurricanes is a different matter. Look at the patents. Link. Many the claims have been redacted. A working model is not required for a patent. http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/0700_706_03_a.htm With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device. If operability of a device is questioned, the applicant must establish it to the satisfaction of the examiner, but he or she may choose his or her own way of so doing. Patents have to have utility and be operative. Reducing the impact of a hurricane certainly is a subject with utility, and since hurricanes are known to have dropped in severity when they hit cold water, the patent certainly is theoretically operative. The patents do not say how many boats are needed. The patent office does not have any regulations saying that a patent has to be economically feasible.
Probably Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And having Bill Gates' name on the application probably didn't hurt their publicity. Maybe Bill and I could write a paper about string theory... Anyway, I'd still be interested to see the calculation, to see if the idea really IS feasible (assuming, of course, that it worked).
He is apparently saying that you could decrease the intensity by about 1/2 a "category" per 60 square miles, not that you can completely kill it.
He just filed some patents, which is basically free if you already have a standing army of patent lawyers (which he does). He probably figures he might as well parent it, since if it pays off he could make a lot of money and if it doesn't pay off he's not really out anything.
Anyway, I think the relevant statistic that we would need to figure out if this is possible would be the volume/time necessary.
