Amidst the flood of news about Irma, two news items caught my attention.
The first one was about the residents of Florida using fans to re-direct Irma and the second about people shooting at Irma to turn it away. While these could be looked upon as funny stuff at a certain level, it could also be looked at as an act of last resort by scared people who just want to do whatever they could..though naive. Having recently faced the wrath of Vardah cyclone in december 2016, i do empathize with the residents of Florida.
The conversation with my brother and another friend on Irma led us dig out the following facts
1. A hurricane is a tropical cyclone that occurs in the Atlantic Ocean and northeastern Pacific Ocean, a typhoon occurs in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, and a cyclone occurs in the south Pacific or Indian Ocean. More details here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
2. Cyclones are measured using the Saffir-Simpson scale. Vardah that hit Chennai in december 2016 was a category 2 cyclone whereas Irma is a category 5 cyclone. you can know more about the scale here.
3. We also discussed whether it is possibility of detonating a bomb to snuff out a cyclone.
On the possibility of Nuking a cyclone, the answer is a resounding No*. there is lot of material out there, but would like to point out to the following article read in the National Geographic which traces the history of this bad idea
"The key obstacle is the amount of energy required. The heat release from a hurricane is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes, NOAA calculates. In order to shrink a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square yard inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for an eye 25 miles in diameter. “It’s difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around,” NOAA says.
The National Geographic article sums it up
"Today, international law prohibits us from even trying. The Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty, signed and ratified by the United States in 1990, limits the yield of weapons for non-military purposes to 150 kilotons—a formal acknowledgement that you can’t fight Mother Nature, especially with nukes."
For all the progress that mankind has made.. we are still nothing against the fury or might of mother nature. To below quote from chapter II History and the Earth The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant , says it all
Man's ingenuity often overcomes geological handicaps: he can irrigate deserts and air-condition the sahara;...he can build a floating city to cross the ocean, or gigantic birds to navigate the sky. But a Tornado can ruin in an hour the city that too a century to build; an iceberg can overrun or bisect the floating palace and send a thousand merrymakers gurgling to the great certainty. Let the rain become too rare, and civilization disappears under the sand, as in Central Asia; let it fall too furiously, and civilization will be choked with jungle, as in Central America. Let the thermal average rise by twenty degrees in our thriving zones, and we should probably relapse into lethargic savagery. In a semi tropical climate, a nation of half a billion souls may breed like ants, but enervating heat may subject it to repeated conquest by warriors from more stimulating habitats. Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.
P.S1 The complete article can be found at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/…/hurricanes-weather-hi…/
P.S2 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric administration (USA) Faq on the topic http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html
P.S3 The questions is also discussed in Quora. do search if you are interested to know more.
P.S4 Image courtesy : By NASA’s Aqua/MODIS satellite - http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view_rec.php?id=6204[dead link], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=400656
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