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Science News

Hurricane's Eye Reveals a New Power Source 114

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the look-into-my-eye dept.
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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Hurricane's Eye Reveals a New Power Source More

Hurricane's Eye Reveals a New Power Source

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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.

    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, sure. You guys may say that now.. but just you wait! You'll change your tune after scientists
      discover the real driving force behind hurricanes: ME!

        Your friend,
        The Big Giant Brain

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
      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.
        • Sounds like we're headed for the eye of a Shiticane [wikiquote.org] here!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shihar ( 153932 )
        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.
      • Everyone knows that we can stop them but only if Sean Penn agrees to be a human shield. The superpowers of an actor are undeniable!
      • The problem with stopping hurricanes is there are many areas where hurricanes provide most of the rainfall.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by joto ( 134244 )
        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:2)

        by Coppit ( 2441 )

        Assuming that this article doesn't outline an Achilles heel for hurricanes, there really is no way to stop them. From NOAA [noaa.gov]:

        To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion (500,000,000) tons for a 20 km radius eye. It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around.

    • 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

    • Is this idea [energybulletin.net] viable? My guess is no, you only get hurricanes because thousands of square miles of surrounding atmosphere are rotating, and have angular momentum to carry in towards the centre. On the other hand I know nothing about atmospheric physics: my objection might be silly

    • A look at last year's paper listed in the article reveals they use the MM5 model [ucar.edu]. I doubt they switched from it in the time between that paper being submitted and the new one to come out next month.

  • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khallow ( 566160 )

        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).

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by maxume ( 22995 )
        Isn't it more appropriate to talk about the energy that they result from?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khaed ( 544779 )
        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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lawpoop ( 604919 )
        OK, then, could we seed hurricanes in the ocean where they can do less damage, if we can't stop them?

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Ailicec ( 755495 )
        As I learned from watching the Sci-Fi channel, the solution will invariably involve detonating a nuclear weapon.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plover ( 150551 ) *

        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.

        Thanks. In one of your linked article's FAQ answers [noaa.gov], I found this very relevant quote from the NAS's conclusions from 1985:

        A special committee of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that a more complete understanding of the physical processes taking place in hurricanes was needed before any additional modification experiments.

        But isn't the point of TFA pretty much that we now have exactly that: "a more complete understanding of the physical processes taking place in hurricanes"? So do we now know enough to try ag

        • As one of those researchers seeking that more complete understanding, I can tell you that we're finding out that things are a whole lot more complex than expected. We're just discovering the physical processes that force some of the vital parts of the hurricane vortex. Rainbands are still a topic of active research and things like concentric (secondary) eyewalls are just beginning to have the spotlights turned on them. (Interestingly, there was a lull in hurricane research from about 1985 to 1995 (coinci
          • perhaps you do not watch many sci-fi movies but the solution to any disaster is to blow it the fuck up with nukes.

            angry russians -- vapourised.
            asteroids -- pulverized.
            earth's core shutting down -- nothing rhymes here.
            earthquakes -- well we all know how well explosions work for crustal lube.

            so why not just apply this same logic to a hurricane? five or ten strategically placed 200 megaton nuclear warheads should be able to dismantle the eyewall. As for the fallout: the rest of the country probably won't miss

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by KC7JHO ( 919247 )
            So if it is a pressure relief valve, why not focus on trying to create one instead of killing one? If we create on early enough it will not have the reserve energy to become a "mega cat5" or what ever and their for should not be near as damaging. To kill one would likely take more force than creating one as to create one you should be able to apply lower force for longer time, not an option on a moving one.
    • 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

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Richard McBeef ( 1092673 )
      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 CO2 output seems to work...


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

          Fixed that for you.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dylan_- ( 1661 )

            ~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?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rts008 ( 812749 )
      "...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,

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by iago-vL ( 760581 )
        Of course, there can also be an up-side! If we could direct hurricanes towards [insert your favorite scapegoat here: Canada?], life would be great!

        Disclaimer: I live in Canada, and I think this is a bad idea.
      • I partially agree and partially disagree. The disagreement is that if mankind had the ability to divert a hurricane's path by say a medium fraction of a percent per hour, it would theoretically become possible to nearly always cause the hurricane to come over land at the least damaging, most advantageous point, or to "steer" a big storm into cooler waters where it will lose power.

        But I agree that those areas designated as "better targets" wouldn't like the idea much because then they would be in for it in

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by plover ( 150551 ) *

        Of course, what would really be beautiful would be investment in infrastructure to limit the damage caused by these storms and improve evacuation routes combined with a gigantic beating with the common sense stick for those who choose to live along areas where hurricanes can hit but also choose to not prepare at all for the inevitable storm.

        I think the insurance companies hold the big stick, and they need to start swinging it hard. I'm paying for hurricane damage through my homeowner policy rates, and

    • 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
  • It's that "...largely believed trivial in the past..." part that got my attention. Here's a brand-new discovery about a single phenomenon that counters what was previously known. This is One. Weather. Phenomenon. And yet we're supposed to take seriously the idea that climate science is "settled." The mind boggles.

    Go read about LTCM [wikipedia.org] for a stark look at how well even the brightest minds have done at modeling complex systems.
    • Hurricane == weather

      Dry, wet, hot, cold, == climate

      We do not even have near the computing capacity to model to the resolution needed to see hurricanes in the models. To pretend that climatology is the same thing as meteorology to make a point is stupidity.
      • The only way your point makes sense is if you're arguing global climate modeling is less complex than modeling a single hurricane. That seems absurd on its face. And if we can't accurately model the lesser, how can we accurately model the greater?
        • No... it makes sense in the correct order.

          The factors that govern precipitation across the globe as well as temperatures across the globe are extremely complex... just because climatology focuses on a small set of descriptors does not make their calculations over a long period of time simple.

  • Climate power (Score:5, Funny)

    by gmuslera ( 3436 ) 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.
  • Ok, hear me out. If this is so important, then perhaps disrupting this motion could destroy a hurricane. An eye-wall is a much smaller target than the eye or the whole storm. Could a million pounds of propane in a fuel-air mix disrupt the air enough to destabilize the hurricane? At billions of dollars of damage per storm, it's time to start thinking offensively. Let's strike the storm abroad so that we don't have to face it at home.
    • 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!
    • like dropping a fuel-air bomb in to the eye of a hurricane?

      I was thinking more like something frozen
  • 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.

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