Back in 2005, after I returned from covering Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Gulf Coast, an editor at my newspaper asked me a very simple question: Why can’t somebody figure out how to stop these monster storms? Or at least slow them down long enough for more people to get out of the way.
Curious myself, and eager not to go through another experience like Katrina, I looked into it. Turns out, we’ve tried. Back in the 1960s, the U.S. government created something that sounds right out of a comic book: Project Stormfury (or, as it is actually written in all the government documents about the project -- to look more impressive, I’m assuming, because it certainly works for me -- Project STORMFURY).
Their plan: Drop silver iodide from airplanes into the outer rainbands of a storm. As I recounted in my story for the Charlotte Observer, the goal was to create a new ring of convection (a second eye) to compete with a hurricane's powerful center, robbing it of some of its punch. They know it wasn’t possible to stop a storm entirely, but even a small reduction in windspeed could reduce a storm’s damage significantly.
Over the course of a decade starting in 1961, government scientists and the U.S. military seeded the clouds in four hurricanes. The storms weakened a bit, so they thought it might be working.
Then Hugh Willoughby came along. The former director of the government's Hurricane Research Division concluded that a natural process called "eyewall replacement" often makes storms wobble in intensity, and Project Stormfury’s “results” were just a product of that natural process. Willoughby and I talked on the phone back in 2005 as Hurricane Rita made its way toward the Texas coast, and he predicted to me that the eyewall replacement phenomenon would cause Rita to weaken a bit. That’s exactly what happened.
"If I were really astute," Willoughby, by then a professor at Florida International University, told me, "I'd go out tonight and seed the clouds, and when the winds drop I'd claim, 'I saved Houston! For $50 million, I'll do it again.' "
So the government gave up on silver iodide. But since then, atmospheric researchers and zealous amateurs have hatched plenty of other storm-dampening schemes, from shooting space-based heat rays into a hurricane to lining the coast with giant windmills to push storms back out to sea. Other whacky ideas that I chronicled for my Observer story (some of them proposed by scientists and engineers with lots of prestigious letters behind their names) included dropping sponges from airplanes; blasting storms with a fleet of jet engines; using satellites with mirrors to reflect solar radiation and change wind patterns; and dragging icebergs from the North Pole to cool down the tropics. (If you read Alexis Madrigal’s recent piece on iceberg-towing in The Atlantic, you know why that last one was a bust.)
Robert Simpson, a former director of the National Hurricane Center (and one of the guys the Saffir-Simpson storm scale is named after), thought spreading an oil slick in front of a hurricane might work. The Soviets tested it over the Pacific Ocean in the 1970s. The results were never disclosed, but one assumes that even the commies couldn’t have kept that one quiet if it worked.
Willoughby has heard all of these ideas and then some. He even helped come up with a few himself, such as building fiberglass ducts to suck frigid water from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean and cool the Gulf Stream, whose warm waters often give hurricanes a burst of intensity as they cross over it. One drawback: Messing with the Gulf Stream might kick off the next ice age.
"When you do this kind of mega-engineering," Willoughby told me, "you might create a solution that comes back and bites you in the backside." (Proponents of geoengineering schemes to stop climate change, take note.)
The fact is, hurricanes exist for a reason -- they’re part of the grand dance of the earth’s atmospheric system. They move heat from the tropics toward the poles, provide much-needed rain to parts of North America during late summer, and even help cleanse coastal ecosystems. The planet needs them, even if we humans are determined to keep building our biggest cities and vacation homes right in their path with little thought for the consequences.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has pretty much given up on influencing storms. So has the American Meteorological Society, which concluded in 1998 that there is "no sound physical hypothesis" for trying it. Scientists keep coming up with ideas, though. Another hopeful dreamer that I talked to for my Observer story was Robert Langer, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s trying to create a substance that could be spread in front of a hurricane to absorb water vapor (a variation on Simpson's old oil-slick idea).
"The biggest problem we've had is getting funding," Langer told me then. "The government will spend $50 billion on recovery, and we could have helped them for a great deal less."
Curious if he had made any progress in the six years since our conversation, I emailed Langer as Hurricane Irene raised serious alarms along the East Coast yesterday. (Shutting down the New York City subways? Insanity!) He told me that he and his lab have made minor progress on the concept and developed some model test systems, but they’ve made no progress on the most important issue -- money -- despite writing grant proposals and meeting with government officials, including governors and senators.
It seems that when it comes to the weather, we’re still all talk: no one wants to do anything about it -- until it’s too late. Hey, that reminds me of this other big problem we’ve been having lately…
Want to know more about schemes for stopping storms? Check out our photo gallery of the most common suggestions -- and find out how they've fared. (Image at top: Project Stormfury in 1966)
