In the X-Men movies, superhero Storm conjures and quashes thunderheads and raging winds at will. It’s a superpower scientists might like to wield to annihilate hurricanes, but in the real world, they have a better chance of easing the fury of these vicious storms than stopping them. And while we’re not even there yet, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will take a significant step this fall toward taming hurricanes.

 

In the wake of Katrina and Rita in 2005, the DHS began counting hurricanes as national security threats. Last fall the agency asked scientists if any new techniques could change a hurricane’s path or minimize its wind speed to reduce Category 5 storms to Category 4, and so on. “The answer is yes, and not just since Katrina. In the past five to ten years, distinguished scientists have introduced ideas for hurricane modification in the literature,” says hurricane scientist Joe Golden, of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

 

But those ideas haven’t made it into labs, in large part because of a nearly 30-year dry spell in federal funding for weather modification research. Now it appears that hiatus is over. William Laska, a program manager for Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency who is spearheading the hurricane inquiries, says he got approval in May for new research from DHS Under Secretary Jay Cohen. “We’re expecting funding in fiscal year ’09,” Laska says.

 

This renewed interest comes amid the NOAA Climate Prediction Center’s discovery that Atlantic hurricane seasons since 1995 have been the nastiest of any on record—a trend that’s likely to continue as global temperatures rise.

 

By improving our hazy understanding of cloud physics, Golden and other scientists hope to mitigate storms rather than prevent, steer, or annihilate them. “Attempts to use nuclear weapons [to destroy hurricanes] will result in a cure worse than the disease,” Golden says. “Any brute force is doomed to fail. The idea is to nudge Mother Nature by attacking a weak point and incrementally modifying natural processes.”

 

A hurricane, also called a typhoon or cyclone, requires three conditions to form: warm ocean water, evaporation, and inward-spiraling winds. Weather modification scientists try to inhibit one or more of these conditions in order to lessen the severity of a storm.

 

Among the more plausible ideas is exploiting the storm’s need for warm water, a concept that proposes pumping cold water from the depths of the sea to the surface, simulating a natural cold upwelling. A group of US scientists is using computer models to explore the scheme. Along the same lines, Atmocean, a private company in Santa Fe, New Mexico, envisions protecting the Gulf of Mexico by deploying 1.6 > million vertical tubes, each 2.5 meters in diameter and extending 200 to 300 meters below the surface. A buoy atop each tube and a valve at the bottom will pull cold water to the surface with the motion of every wave.

 

Russian scientists in the ’80s and, later, a group from MIT experimented with impeding evaporation by dispensing a thin layer of emulsifying alcohol over the surface of the ocean. Both studies found that in high winds, the layer of oil broke up and evaporation continued.

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