Weather Control Satellites 16
This is old news, but quite cool.
AntiPasto writes "According to this article at techreview.com ... the Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation has a way to stop a tornado from happening by simply microwaving it. Which brings up the question whether to have it on defrost or not, or more importantly how do you get it in there?" The technical paper is available
here
and space.com had an article a while back,
here.
Real Genius (Score:1)
Global Hubris, anyone? (Score:1)
And the proposal would not stop thunderstorms and their rain, the goal is to disrupt a single powerful updraft, and leave multiple-updraft thunderstorms operating.
Not that it would be easy to create and control that much power safely. If you have that powerful a power plant, you could instead just have a flying building with enough fans to directly change airflows. Sometimes applying energy in the form of a physical device is easier than radiant energy.
Re:Hubris, anyone? (Score:1)
Actually, large cities tend to be somewhat tornado-resistant. They tend to be a bit warmer than the surrounding countryside, which seems to deflect twisters, and reinforced concrete construction, which is a standard for many commercial buildings, handles tornadoes pretty well, and in fact, seems to weaken any funnel clouds that have the temerity to attack them.
Re:Hubris, anyone? (Score:1)
However, as far as this thread goes, I've got two counterpoints:
1) Newly developed land generally doesn't start with reinforced concrete skyscrapers. It'll most likely begin with suburban sprawl, which last I saw was pretty vulnerable. (Remember those towns I mentioned are near me?)
2) That works now, when there's still a relatively low city density. What happens as the area of cities increases? I believe that the heat shell is able to deflect tornadoes now, but if the storm has nowhere else to go, I can see it breaking such a barrier. (I think it's reasonable to assume that city area is going to increase in the coming years. Population's still rising, and we've gotta put them *somewhere*.)
Re:Hubris, anyone? (Score:1)
IMHO, such an animal is impossible in any form of dynamic environment. As soon as the environment changes, adaptation is no longer optimal. The animal can adapt, but adaptation will always lag environment unless the animal has perfect predictive capacity (also probably impossible).
More importantly, it's still got to deal with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Eventually, it will run out of resources or time and join the rest of us as some nice hydrogen clouds down around 1K.
Fighting Greenhouse Effects (Score:1)
If perhaps we could put web cams on the satellites and allow people to see raw unencoded data (actual data would be encrypted so that others couldn't send their own commands) sent to the satellites to control them, it would allow the public to verify what the weather control satellites are doing. The weather satellites should never do anything that the public is unaware of.
Re:Other uses for giant microwaves (Score:1)
cool.. (Score:1)
You could use it to end pest problems on farms..
or destroy missle guidence systems...
or just interupt communication......
screw the side effects right?
Mucking with the weather (Score:1)
Weather patterns are part of the earth's ability to correct and maintain itself.
It is also used to control the bacteria called man from overrunning and destroying the planet.
Aim and Accuracy (Score:1)
From the article:
According to modeling by Eastlund on supercomputers at the University of Oklahoma's Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms, about 100 million watts of energy added to the descending air column could disrupt a downdraft that otherwise might spawn a tornado.
Notwithstanding the potentially beneficial aspect of preventing a tornado from spawning, I get the heebie geebies thinking of the potential loss of life when that 100 megawatts of microwaves is more tightly focused and used as a weapon to cook all the inhabitants of a city. Same problems if they tried to use lasers, instead.
Seems to me that the desire to use such a device rises with the population of the region that the tornado approaches. What are the risks to people who are in the path of those microwaves? Cancer? Genetic mutation? Who is going to make the assessment of what amount of injury to people via microwaves is acceptable? I'd like to see much more work invested in the sociological implications of such a device before much more work goes towards its implications. Could it be that this is a solution whose price we cannot afford?
With the power to create comes the power to destroy.
Other uses for giant microwaves (Score:1)
Hell, without the limitations of fitting it into a countertop model, I could nuke the BIGGEST plate of nachos ever...
God I love science!
Re:Hubris, anyone? (Score:1)
How it works (Score:1)
The reason "heat shields" around dense, highrise cityscapes and the tornado microwave work is because they are removing the mass of cold air that helps to create the twister.
So, Alik is right, a twister of sufficient power (and especialy one of high velocity) could run straight through a so called "heat shield" if one were in the area. But, since the dense cities we are talking about are giving off so much heat in a stable location, the cold front cannot meet the warm front and share that "special hug" to make the little ball of joy we call a tornado. Thats why you *USUALLY* don't hear about the buggers hitting big cities, and only lower end urban areas (like trailer parks, which are usually out of town and on flat plains, good breeding ground for the storms). Of course there was that tornado that materialized in the middle of Salt Lake City and flew up Temple Street and then dissapeared before it actually hit the bastion of the Mormon church (just barely missed it), but lets not devolve into religious flamewar.
Hope that was at least semi-informative...
Not weather lasers, but the closest we've gotten.. (Score:1)
Not total climate changes like we are discussing here, but possibly the closest we have come to it.
Re:Other uses for giant microwaves (Score:2)
Sweet design. I'd love to lay my hands on one (but not while working...)
Johan
Hubris, anyone? (Score:3)
One teeny problem I see with this is the problem of balancing ecological requirements with human expansionist tendencies. If we can build something which is genuinely capable of turning off tornadoes, there are plenty of high-risk zones that will suddenly be lucrative development opportunities. They'll be developed. It will be necessary to turn off the storms in those areas to prevent massive damage to life and property.
Personally, if you gave me the option to set the "Tornadoes" flag for the planet to "No", I wouldn't do it. Although I have no proof, intution suggests that if you remove a major climate phenomenon entirely, you have the potential for seriously screwing up the whole system. Environmental scientists would scream bloody murder if such a system ever went up.
The obvious solution is to allow storms to form in unpopulated zones. Two problems exist there. One, if there's a square inch of earth that *can* be made habitable, someone will want to live there. Two, once you create the storm, you can't steer it. It might form deep in the wilderness, but move fairly quickly into a populated region. My impression from reading this is that it can only be used to stop storms before they start.
It's not at all a bad idea, I'm just really worried that it's going to be implemented/used poorly and that we're all going to get screwed over.