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Hurricane's Eye Reveals a New Power Source

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon May 14, 2007 06:13 PM
from the look-into-my-eye dept.
Science News
Taking a closer look at the seemingly calm center of a hurricane, NASA researchers have been able to determine a few clues about what powers a hurricane. "Using computer simulations and observations of 1998's Hurricane Bonnie in southern North Carolina, scientists were able to get a detailed view of pockets of swirling, warm humid air moving from the eye of the storm to the ring of strong thunderstorms in the eyewall that contributed to the intensification of the hurricane. The findings suggest that the flow of air parcels between the eye and eye wall — largely believed trivial in the past — is a key element in hurricane intensity and that there's more to consider than just the classic 'in-up-and-out' flow pattern. The classic pattern says as air parcels flow 'in' to the hurricane's circulation, they rise 'up,' form precipitating clouds and transport warm air to the upper atmosphere before moving 'out' into surrounding environmental air."
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  • misleading title anyone? (Score:5, Funny)

    by naoursla (99850) on Monday May 14 2007, @06:16PM (#19123119) Homepage Journal
    Maybe they could have referenced the Eye of Sauron to make the title a little more misleading.

  • We all know what powers a hurricane. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2007, @06:17PM (#19123121)
    The angry fist of God. Repent or you shall be smoten.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Smote.

      My nuts are halfway up my ass but other than that I'm perfect.
    • Sir, I would like to vote for you in my Republican primary!

  • Nice find (Score:5, Informative)

    by Orp (6583) on Monday May 14 2007, @06:25PM (#19123209) Homepage
    Nice find submitter. Unfortunately the article isn't in print yet, I'd like to look at what model they used (I presume it was WRF [wrf-model.org]. We are able to simulate hurricanes at unprecedented resolution today, resolving convective features that just weren't there before in coarsers simulations. Coupling this numerical finding with observations makes a strong case.

    This is big news, if it pans out, by the way. Certain aspects of hurricanes are still somewhat of a mystery. We are pretty good at tracking their path today but are still pretty bad at forecasting their intensity. This work will certainly help with understanding what determines the intensity. Very nifty stuff.

    • Re:Nice find (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Aadain2001 (684036) on Monday May 14 2007, @06:33PM (#19123285) Journal
      Do you think that once we identify the 'engine' driving a hurricane we could throw a metaphorical wrench in it before causes another Katrina? Also, should we even try? While preventing a hurricane from making landfall and destroying cities would be good for us humans, are the effects of hurricanes an important part of ecosystems/global weather patterns? Basically, can we stop them and if so, would it be a good idea to even try?

      • Re:Nice find (Score:5, Interesting)

        by TooMuchToDo (882796) on Monday May 14 2007, @06:54PM (#19123523)
        My only fear is that a hurricane is the weather system's pressure release valve, and stopping hurricanes would cause more problems then the hurricane itself causes.
      • I doubt we could ever stop a Hurricane in the near future, but if we could predict killer Hurricanes as they near the coast and then downgrade them, that would certainly be a worthy endeavor. While any manipulation of Hurricane strength would almost certainly be costly, it would be a whole hell of a lot cheaper then something like Katrina. It isn't like you need to stop them all, just the ones that are set to do massive amounts of damage... and you don't even need to stop it, just degrade its intensity.
      • I mean, come on. In 3012, Slashdot headlines are going to read something like, "Scientists Trap a Solar Flare Inside Small Tupperware Container", and someone's going to come along and go, "Oy, is that a good idea?"

        But then, potential power sources always get consideration despite the consequences. Exhibit A: the internal combustion engine.
      • I would love to start throwing metaphorical wrenches at tornados. Give me a metaphorical wrench, and I'll throw it at any tornado you point out to me!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DerekLyons (302214)

      Nice find submitter. Unfortunately the article isn't in print yet, I'd like to look at what model they used (I presume it was WRF. We are able to simulate hurricanes at unprecedented resolution today, resolving convective features that just weren't there before in coarsers simulations. Coupling this numerical finding with observations makes a strong case.

      Don't forget the most important step of the process - going out and looking for those convective features in a real hurricane. Predictions and models are

      • Re:Nice find (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ThosLives (686517) on Monday May 14 2007, @07:52PM (#19124157) Journal

        Also, don't forget the unintended side effects we'd have if these giant heat engines weren't around to transport all that surface thermal energy to the upper atmosphere where it radiates into space. The heat transfer from these storms is enormous, and I doubt that we'd want to see what the global warming models look like if we don't have hurricanes. Incidentally, I wonder if those models actually include hurricanes as a dissipation mechanism... Hurricanes are fairly large atmospheric features, but I'm betting they are still too small to show up on the scale of the models.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by terrymr (316118)
          Surely stopping one or more storms would just lead to more poweful ones forming as the heat in the system continues to increase.

        • Keep asking questions like this one and you may get there yet. I only want to throw a monkey wrench into the works to make people see reality. Fact: the IR mapping of these storms shows that these "High Towers" are not hotter but colder than any other segment of the storm. Question: Has anyone done a calculation of the mass and temperature of the hot air expelled from a hurricane and found it yet?!!! Remember that the volume of the expelled air due to altitude should be more than 100 times that of sea le

  • Predicting? How about controlling? (Score:5, Informative)

    by plover (150551) * on Monday May 14 2007, @06:30PM (#19123251) Homepage Journal
    I understand that predicting hurricane strength and path is important for evacuations and hurricane preparations, but how about some research on disrupting hurricanes?

    Is there a way to break up these moisture exchanges that "fuel" the hurricane (the article used a rather poor analogy about 'raising octane')? Like we do with forest fires, can we do some creative cloud seeding to either reduce their intensity, or perhaps alter their paths away from densely populated areas?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pitdingo (649676)
      Before we go interupting hurricanes, perhaps we should better understand why they form? Basically they exchange energy between the oceans and the atmosphere. If we "preempt" the formation of hurricanes, what consequences would that have to the earth?

      These storms do form for a reason. And the amount of energy released by these storms is enormous.

      • Basically they exchange energy between the oceans and the atmosphere.

        That's actually the oceans and (to a lesser extent) atmosphere to space. Hurricanes greatly increase the heat that is radiated into space.
    • As it is, weather management really hasn't been rigorously tested or proven. Because of the number of uncontrollable factors, it's hard to tell if the money spent doing that is making any real difference.

    • Re:Predicting? How about controlling? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Orp (6583) on Monday May 14 2007, @06:49PM (#19123471) Homepage
      Unfortunately, no. Hurricanes are way too big and generate way too much energy for us to have an effect.

      This [noaa.gov] will answer all of your questions about trying to destroy hurricanes.

      There was an article in Scientific American about a year or so ago that had a cover story about this. The authors posited that if we had accurate enough forecasts, we could modify the initial conditions (through some sort of perturbation) before the storm even started, and get it to, for instance, form over the open sea instead of over land.

      But such forecasts are probably not possible for, say, 50 years at least, and that assumes we have much, much better observational data than we do today (and of course Moore's Law holds true, or something like it).
      • get it to, for instance, form over the open sea instead of over land.

        Hurricanes do form over the open sea. The Atlantic hurricanes form off the coast of Africa and move toward North America, then when they hit the warmer water in the Gulf Coast or other areas in the Atlantic, they get much, much stronger. Hitting land is one of the things that weakens them. After a few hours on land, they're basically just big rain storms. I think you meant direct them to open sea and away from land.
      • OK, then, could we seed hurricanes in the ocean where they can do less damage, if we can't stop them?
      • As I learned from watching the Sci-Fi channel, the solution will invariably involve detonating a nuclear weapon.
    • They have actually been experimenting with this just about since Bernard Vonnegut discovered cloud seeding.
      The people who designed the experiments only chose to do them under certain conditions, and since sometimes there are years when no hurricanes, or no appropriate hurricanes, it took them a long time to find the right hurricanes to experiment on. And so they did get some results, but hurricanes being what they are, they were never able to come to any conclusions about whether the cloud seeding had any r
    • I understand that predicting hurricane strength and path is important for evacuations and hurricane preparations, but how about some research on disrupting hurricanes?

      Hahahah. Man controlling the weather. That's priceless. There is no way humans could ever have any effect on such a large and complex system.
      • ~100 years of high CO2 output seems to work...

          • ~100 years of high SOLAR output seems to work...

            Fixed that for you.

            Except, of course, that solar output hasn't been higher. [realclimate.org]

            Why do I get the feeling that this won't put a dent in your delusion that you're more of an expert in this subject than the climatologists who actually study it for a living?

    • "...some creative cloud seeding..."

      I suggest we just drop Texas or California on it and flatten it like a pancake...that'll teach those blowhards.
    • "...alter their paths away from densely populated areas?"

      If you were to do this to a hurricane in, say, the middle of the Atlantic, perhaps this wouldn't be a bad idea - it could save Georgia and the Carolinas from a lot of damage. But what about hurricanes in the Gulf? As someone who grew up in the Florida panhandle, I can tell you right now that this would not be a very politically popular thing to do. I can see the scenario now:

      "Well, the hurricane looked like it was heading to New Orleans (or Tampa,
    • We've known how to do this for a long time, no one has the balls. All we have to do is gas all the butterflies.

  • I thought we already knew (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kohath (38547) on Monday May 14 2007, @06:31PM (#19123261)
    I thought we already knew that hurricanes happen because George Bush doesn't care about black people.
    • Thank you for that. I needed a laugh. You saved me from posting an angry diatribe against the ignorance of consensus science.

      I typed more, but then I realized I went ahead and typed up that angry diatribe anyway. I'll spare you all by deleting it now. ;)

  • A note on how they did the experiment (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    NASA was able to detect the hot air pockets in the center of a hurricane using a clever indirect method. They dispatched two solar-powered rovers with B&W cameras to the center of hurricane Bonnie.

    Since the rovers carried no atmospheric equipment, they used the haze apparent in B&W stills to estimate the moisture density of the air, and obtained a temperature estimate using an IR camera.

    Of course, the major aim of the Bonnie mission was to search for life within the hurricane, so the rovers were eq

  • Climate power (Score:5, Funny)

    by gmuslera (3436) <gmuslera@@@gmail...com> on Monday May 14 2007, @07:51PM (#19124137) Homepage Journal
    Hurricanes are not the only big power source around climate events. With the power of lightning you can get nothing less than 1.2 Gigawatts, just enough to power up a time machine built inside a DeLorean. And thunderstorms is far more frequent than hurricanes.
  • The moist packets of air move from the eye-wall to the eye and supercharge the Hot Tower....
    OK, I'm kind of getting that this may be the script for: "Confessions of the Pizza Boy."

    Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it. I'm sure if we started calling Hurricanes "the Pizza Boy" and perhaps talk about the heat exchange as a marriage between wind and moisture, well, we'd have the administration right on top of those Shenanigans.

    "Well send our best man -- Jeff Gannon, and he'll

  • The findings suggest that the flow of air parcels between the eye and eye wall -- largely believed trivial in the past -- is a key element in hurricane intensity and that there's more to consider than just the classic 'in-up-and-out' flow pattern.

    In fact it's long been known that you get tornados associated with hurricanes, here's one example [stormeyes.org] with eighteen, created by with the larger of these "air parcels". So trivial is maybe not the best word.

    • You can't win, briancnorton. If you strike the hurricane down by burning propane, the source of hurricanes(our increasingly screwed up environment) shall become more vindictive than you can possibly imagine!

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