they explained about "Project
Stormfury" and earlier attempts and their inconclusive
results, and about later ideas of cooling the warm seas that
energize these storms.
I invented some different ideas that I will now present (one is
close to "Project Cirrus" but more "focused"), arranged by order
of "fail-safe" protections that backup one another:
Windtraps
(although the name is taken from my favorite sci-fi novel Dune,
the idea is different, in the book they're catching humidity from
the air).
In addition to saving lives and property in the USA, these
windtraps will produce a lot of electricity which will cover some
of the costs of running them.
according to her, the hurricanes that hit the USA are made by the
"African
easterly jet". I'm not sure how reliable is that
website, so I'm relying on Wikipedia.
The jet's maximum wind speeds are at a height of 3 kilometers.
How do we "harvest" this wind? the first step is to make a huge
funnel. The entry of the funnel will reach the desired height of 3
kilometers.
Unfortunately we can't build buildings that high, so we will
build the structure like a huge "fly tent",
with a very large entry and very small exit.
normally the fabric is held by a pole, but in our case it will be
anchored to a helicopter that will hover in the same place at the
3 km height.
a helicopter can hover in 3.169 kilometers so that's ok. As soon
as it runs low on fuel, the helicopter lands, refuels and gets up
again.
To have constant "up-time" we arrange two windtraps one behind
the other, and coordinate their helicopters so that one is always
flying.
By the way instead of one strong helicopter when can use a few
smaller drones for the same task, and they can be powered with
solar power (charged by day, fly by night).
The fabric itself should be the same material which is used for
parachutes - strong, light, durable to weather, and of course able
to handle strong wind.
What will be in the exit of this funnel? We will build wind
turbines that look like a long tunnel with a few propellers one
behind the other.
The end of the tunnel is open so the air can come out but now
it's much slower.
Proto-cyclones first develop a vortex at middle levels in the
troposphere. Only then does a smaller surface vortex form beneath the
mid-level vortex.
according to Wikipedia the altitude of the troposphere in the
tropics is 18 km.
Normally drones can only reach 3 kilometers high, but an "unmanned
gas balloon" can reach 50 kilometers.
So if we'll connect a drone to one or more balloons I think we
can get it to fly and navigate by GPS at the required altitude of
18 km.
What will be the most effective thing for the drones to do there? To
answer this we need to understand what the wind is doing there - a
ring.
Here is a very nice video about Coriolis Force by Eric Snodgrass.
A short video explaining the Coriolis Effect starring several
graduate students from the Department of Atmospheric Science at the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Watch what happens on minute 4:41 when Amanda (the African wind) is
pushing the baseball (air) on the rotating merry-go-round (planet
Earth) in a straight line, but the baseball (air) is getting back to
here in a circle (ring of air) !
This ring of air when it closes enforces itself, gains
"independence" and eventually descends down and "sits" on the ocean,
like a torus or a bagel of rotating air.
We need the drones to disperse or redirect the air from the African
wind, ideally before it closes a loop, or at least before it gains
strength.
Since we need to locate this phenomena first through satellite
images that will see the movement of the ring directly, or maybe
indirectly by following the African wind moving clouds and spotting
places where there's a sudden decrease in the linear wind speed -
because that's where the ring steals the energy to do its thing. At
night we can do it by infra red, because I think at night the
hurricanes won't form that much because the next stages require
evaporation on the water surface (meaning Sun's energy).
So how will the little drones redirect the ring which can be a few
kilometers in diameter? We can use the same trick we did before with
the fabric tunnel, the drones will rise in close formation with the
fabric folded and then will spread out themselves and this will
unfold the fabric in the sky, and then maintanin position. It
doesn't have to be nearly as big as the funnel we mentioned earlier,
I think a few tens of meters will do in the diameter of the entry
will suffice.
Where will they direct the current? The most important thing is to
destroy the ring (sounds like Lord Of The Rings - ha ha), so I
suggest outwards is our best bet because it will disperse the ring.
If we try to redirect the flow inwards it can short-circuit and
create two rings, possible even tighter and faster! If we try to
redirect it downwards, we might hasten the descent of the ring -
which is the ring's ultimate goal - so we probably don't want to do
that. If we redirect the ring upwards, it will eventually come back
down. If we don't have the technology to control where we re-direct
the currents, then a few different random directions are our next
best bet (after the outwards option).
Note: there after the hurricane is already formed on the water there
is a phenomena of "eye
inside an eye". See in Wikipedia "Eyewall
replacement cycle". Since this only happens when the hurricane
is already pretty strong, I don't think we need to worry, but we
should check it out and it could tip the scales towards the
different random directions option above.
The three-dimensional wind field in a tropical cyclone can be
separated into two components: a "primary circulation" and a
"secondary circulation". The primary circulation is the rotational
part of the flow; it is purely circular. The secondary circulation
is the overturning (in-up-out-down) part of the flow; it is in the
radial and vertical directions. The primary circulation is larger in
magnitude, dominating the surface wind field, and is responsible for
the majority of the damage a storm causes, while the secondary
circulation is slower but governs the energetics of the storm.
If you can't imagine it - think of a slinky toy spring,
and bring it's two ends together, so it's a whole circle, not just
half a circle as it normally is. If we trace our finger along the
slinky this is the "primary circulation". But if we let a small ant
walk on the circle, it will walk in and out in and out, which is the
"secondary circulation".
This torus (bagel or doughnut shape) made by the "secondary
circulation" is what keeps the flow of the "primary circulation"
inside it focused and directed in a ring circle. It's like when you
direct plasma with magnetic fields (See Tokamak in Wikipedia,
the "To" part comes from the word for "toroidal" in Russian).
Without this torus the ring will disperse and die out.
in Project
Cirrus, an airplane dropped crushed dry ice into the clouds
along the rainbands of the hurricane.
I think the inconclusive results were because you can't aim
accurately when throwing things from a plane, so sometimes, by pure
chance, it reached the optimal location - along the inside of the
eye of the hurricane, next to the eyewall - and sometimes it didn't.
Also they tried to fight the storm when it was already very strong,
and I recommend to tackle it when it's still small and weak.
how to target the exact location?
If we send flying drones in the air they will not be able to fly
through the storm, My idea is to attack the hurricane from below
with "underwater
drones", which are small robotic submarines with robotic arms.
There are two types: ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) which is
manual, and AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) which is automatic.
Normally the ROV requires people close by. But we can't risk the
people, so we can use one underwater drone or more that will stand
in the middle between the people and the working robot and function
as "radio repeater".
The ROVs AUVa will be deployed in a safe distance from the storm
from fast powerboats, and then the robots will get closer to the
whirlpool of the storm from underwater and encircle it, let's say
for simplicity that we send 4 robots, and they position themselves
to the north, south, east and west of the whirlpool.
Each robot will carry with it a payload of dry ice in the shape of a
torus, tied with a rope to a "Closed
Lifting Bag" (camel) that is designed for rapid
deployment - it has a scuba cylinder mounted on the outside
which contains sufficient air to inflate the bag. So when the robot
inflates and releases this buoy, the buoy leaves the robot and
floats to the surface of the water, with the dry ice hanging from it
in the water (dry ice is heavier then water).
If we manage to release the floating bags so that they float just
outside the storm, the dry ice "weight" will be swept inside by the
whirlpool currents, and if the rope is long enough (not much longer
than the width of the eyewall), then the floating bag will be stuck
outside, and the dry ice will be stuck inside, both of them very
close to the eyewall. At this point of time, the dry ice is cooling
the water in the exact position that is important for maximum effect
of stopping the secondary situation.
If experiments will prove that there isn't enough surface area for
the dry ice to cool the water, we can incorporate a more porous
design (then a torus which only has one hole) to the dry ice block.
As a last resort we can attach (in advance) a small hand grenade
with a long time fuse to the dry ice block, that will allow the dry
ice to reach the optimum position before it explodes. Of course then
we can no longer hold it in position (there is nothing to hold
anymore) and chances are we also ruined the floating bag.
dragging to equator
If all else fails we and this means now that the eyewall is strong
now, so we can use that to our advantage.
The horizontal deflection effect is greater near the poles, since
the effective rotation rate about a local vertical axis is largest
there, and decreases to zero at the equator.
If you are curious why you can see a nice explanation in this video
of Veritasium in minute 4:00
A hurricane can never cross the equator or it will die (it will not
have Coriolis force). Of course it can START in the lower hemisphere
of the Earth and there it's usually called a cyclone, but then it
can't cross the equator to the northern hemisphere of the Earth, so
we can apply the same trick there.
So the trick is to use the same underwater robots we used
previously, this time to deploy a big and massive torus (bagel or
doughnut) shaped "closed lifting bag" that we release from right
under the middle of the storm. It will have a strong cable attached
to it, that we will tie to a ship that will slowly drag the whole
storm towards the equator until it dies out. The cable needs to be
long enough as to not putting the ship at risk.
The weight of the lifting bag will bring it to the bottom of the
funnel of the whirlpool, but its buoyancy will not allow it to sink
to the bottom and exit under the storm, so it's stuck at the tip of
the storm. We are just slowly pulling the tip of the storm and the
whole storm will follow and come with us.