Hurricane
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Scientists are trying to find ways to attack hurricanes. Nine
jets are planning to fly over southern Florida, each carrying
16,000-330,000 pounds of cloud-busting powder. When
sprayed into a wet cloud, this powder combines with the
moisture and turns into a heavy gel, which will then fall to
the ground, removing the moisture from the cloud. They
hope this powder will make hurricane Isidore much
weaker. "We just want to take a punch out of a storm so it
doesn't level your house," says Peter Cordani, of Dyn-o-Mat,
the creator of the powder.
The United States and Russia began seeding clouds with
silver iodide 50 years ago to increase local rainfall. The U.S.
even used cloud seeding to flood the Ho Chi Minh trail during
the Vietnam war. But the U.S. government quit trying to
change the weather in the 1970s after scientists decided it
couldn?t be done. "The problem is the weather changes you
try and achieve by cloud seeding or other methods happen
naturally all the time," says NOAA?s Hugh Willoughby, "And
you can't know the difference."
Last year, during a test, jets sprayed the Dyn-o-Mat powder
in the sky and made a small cloud disappear from a Doppler
radar screen. "We know it can dissipate a cloud," says
meteorologist Peter Ray, who is testing it. "But we don't
know what it will do to ice, freezing water and all the other
kinds of things you might encounter in a large storm."
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
want to try spreading a thin layer of vegetable oil on the
surface of the ocean that would slow down the exchange of
air and water, reducing evaporation, thus reducing the
velocity of a developing hurricane. Others want to use
massive mirrors in space to redirect sunlight and alter
weather patterns by heating cool pockets of air.
Meteorologist Ross Hoffman thinks the dream of controlling
the weather "is in fact a possibility." The key is learning how
to take advantage of the butterfly effect. This refers to the
fact that the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in Singapore can
trigger a chain of events that changes the weather
thousands of miles away in New York City. Hoffman's idea is
to create an artificial butterfly effect by creating a small
change in temperature or humidity in strategic locations to
alter the weather great distances away. "Small changes can
result in large changes as a storm evolves. We can use that
intelligently if we can predict the evolution of a storm. But
we're not there yet," he says.
If meteorologists learn how to control the weather, the
blame for weather damage may move from Mother Nature to
them. Hoffman says, "If you do nothing and there's a
horrible weather event, it's an act of God. But if you do
something and even make matters a little better, someone
may still bear a loss and they're sure to blame you."
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