Why don't we nuke Rita?

Roger Zoul wrote:

How do you know that's what will happen? It might disrupt the whirpool
effect. Done any simulations lately, Dumbass?



Dumbass -

It's likely to enhance it. The shock wave from a nuke is perpendicular
to the direction of the winds and the heat from the blast, if it's in
the eye, will cause air to rise, thereby increasing the spin rate of
the "whirlpool".

Hurricanes happen in the Atlantic in large part because of warm air
rising (heated by the water) in the eye. The nuke would enhance this
feature, temporarily, by a huge amount.


No I haven't done any simulations. I'm no a Fluid Dynamics expert (can
hardly get my head around a single partial differential equation, let
alone the endless cascades of Fourier transforms which describe fluids)
and even if I were, today's supercomputers are way, way, way too slow
to run the simulation.



thanks,

K. Gringioni.

wrote:
How about: Don't build your house next to the ocean, and if you do,
don't ask us to pay to rebuild it.

Should Rita make landfall around Galveston/Houston and wreak
significant damage, I foresee the possibility of insurance companies
filing bankruptcy.

Roger Zoul wrote:

How do you know that's what will happen? It might disrupt the whirpool
effect. Done any simulations lately, Dumbass?

Dumbass,

At least Kurgan gave a reasonably coherent explanation for
what he thought might happen.

Hurricanes are big. Really big. See Bill Asher's post for how
big. But anyway, a lot bigger than the puny amounts of energy
humans have learned how to manipulate. The best way to minimize
hurricane damage is to stay out of the hurricane's ****ing way.

Here's a not-so-bad article from McPaper about some futile attempts
to control hurricanes:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurr...wstormfury.htm

It's a little incomplete because it omits that the experts now think
the basis for the project (eyewall weakening) is something that happens
cyclically in hurricanes anyway:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/reso...lacement_x.htm

BTW, hurricanes draw energy from the circulation of winds which
is caused by the rotation of the Earth. So maybe Pat Robertson
should try to do a Joshua-at-the-walls-of-Jericho and make the
earth stand still. Hey, it's worth a shot.

William Asher wrote:

That would be an interesting experiment.

It wouldn't stop the hurricane though. A nuke in the eye, especially if
it was under water, would cause the water to heat up and the resultant
rise in water temperature along with the mushroom cloud rising into the
air would add energy to the hurricane, speeding up its "whirpool"
effect and increasing the velocity of the winds.

The wind could very well temporarily go up really, really high. I think
we should try it.


thanks,

K. Gringioni.


Not quite. You need to do the math. Your typical large nuke might release
around 20 tera-Joules (TJ) in a fraction of a second. Divide that energy
into the typical blast radius of make 10 km and a typical mixed
layer depth of 100 m (assuming all that energy will be converted directly
into heat (which is isn't)) and you get a relatively small increase in
sea surface temperature. And the atmospheric thermal plume of a bomb burst
is teeny tiny compared to the total area of a hurricane so it is already
vaporizing more water than the bomb burst.

You can think of it in another way by looking at the energy dynamics. The
average power required to sustain a hurricane is on order of 1.5 tera-Watts
(i.e., 1.5 TJ/s) and the energy it releases in the form of rain is around
600 tera-Watts (i.e., 600 TJ/s). So every minute (or so) a hurricane
dissipates 30 times more energy than one big bomb and one big bomb would
only provide enough energy for 20 minutes of hurricane force winds.



Dumbass -

Good analysis, but I wrote "temporarily".

I think the wind around the eye would go up really high (the air
rushing back into vacuum from the atmospheric tests in New Mexico were
400mph, and, as you know, those bombs were very small compared to the
multi-megaton ones we have now) for a short period of time, until the
heat dissipated. Then the hurricane would go back to its former self.


just speculating,

K. Gringioni.

"Kurgan Gringioni" wrote in
oups.com:


William Asher wrote:

That would be an interesting experiment.

It wouldn't stop the hurricane though. A nuke in the eye,
especially if it was under water, would cause the water to heat up
and the resultant rise in water temperature along with the mushroom
cloud rising into the air would add energy to the hurricane,
speeding up its "whirpool" effect and increasing the velocity of
the winds.

The wind could very well temporarily go up really, really high. I
think we should try it.


thanks,

K. Gringioni.


Not quite. You need to do the math. Your typical large nuke might
release around 20 tera-Joules (TJ) in a fraction of a second. Divide
that energy into the typical blast radius of make 10 km and a typical
mixed layer depth of 100 m (assuming all that energy will be
converted directly into heat (which is isn't)) and you get a
relatively small increase in sea surface temperature. And the
atmospheric thermal plume of a bomb burst is teeny tiny compared to
the total area of a hurricane so it is already vaporizing more water
than the bomb burst.

You can think of it in another way by looking at the energy dynamics.
The average power required to sustain a hurricane is on order of 1.5
tera-Watts (i.e., 1.5 TJ/s) and the energy it releases in the form of
rain is around 600 tera-Watts (i.e., 600 TJ/s). So every minute (or
so) a hurricane dissipates 30 times more energy than one big bomb and
one big bomb would only provide enough energy for 20 minutes of
hurricane force winds.



Dumbass -

Good analysis, but I wrote "temporarily".

I think the wind around the eye would go up really high (the air
rushing back into vacuum from the atmospheric tests in New Mexico were
400mph, and, as you know, those bombs were very small compared to the
multi-megaton ones we have now) for a short period of time, until the
heat dissipated. Then the hurricane would go back to its former self.


just speculating,

K. Gringioni.


That figure for the wind speed is right at the explosion site. Farther
out it is much less.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/pdfs/7906.pdf
(see Table 3 on page 18)

A few things about that table, it is for a 1 MT burst at 8,000 ft
altitude (and most warheads nowadays are considerably smaller, not
larger, than 1 MT (e.g., the Peacekeeper warheads are on the order of 400
kT and Trident warheads maybe 100 kT (*and*, I might add, I based my
initial calculations roughly on a bomb the size of the Oak test of
Operation Hardtack and that was around 10 MT (and the largest bomb ever
was a Soviet one of maybe 50 MT so it is not like you are going to get
orders of magnitude larger warheads)))). Secondly, at distances typical
of the radii of a large tropical cyclone (maybe 10 miles), the blast wind
is trivial compared to the eyewall wind velocity (which I recall as being
essentially the maximum velocity in the storm). Furthermore, as I
mentioned, wind speeds of the same order of magnitude as the maximum wind
speeds in that table have been measured inside the convecting clouds
inside the eye, so it is not like you are exposing the storm to something
it doesn't already get exposed to (and it is late so I am going to end
that sentence with a preposition, **** you Mr Grammar Person). Finally,
the blast overpressure from an airburst is a short-duration event. The
blast wave from an underwater detonation is even less intense and since
only about 35% of a blasts energy comes off directly as heat there isn't
enough energy to make a difference to the moisture flux. You need to
face facts that a nuclear burst simply doesn't have enough energy for a
hurricane to even feel for an instant, especially when you consider I
wrote "minutes" instead of "seconds" in my initial analysis.

Hurricane Charley in 2004 was likened to the finger of god being dragged
across Florida because it was so intense and compact. Katrina and Rita
are like the fists of Thor, and the biggest baddest nuke on the planet
would do dick-all to storms of that size. You can't fool with mother
nature.

--
Bill Asher

Carl Sundquist wrote:
wrote:

How about: Don't build your house next to the ocean, and if you do,
don't ask us to pay to rebuild it.


Should Rita make landfall around Galveston/Houston and wreak
significant damage, I foresee the possibility of insurance companies
filing bankruptcy.


Meanwhile, Swiss Re's prediction from last year is looking solid...
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0303-07.htm

" wrote in
oups.com:


Roger Zoul wrote:

How do you know that's what will happen? It might disrupt the
whirpool effect. Done any simulations lately, Dumbass?

Dumbass,

At least Kurgan gave a reasonably coherent explanation for
what he thought might happen.

Hurricanes are big. Really big. See Bill Asher's post for how
big. But anyway, a lot bigger than the puny amounts of energy
humans have learned how to manipulate. The best way to minimize
hurricane damage is to stay out of the hurricane's ****ing way.

Here's a not-so-bad article from McPaper about some futile attempts
to control hurricanes:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurr...wstormfury.htm

It's a little incomplete because it omits that the experts now think
the basis for the project (eyewall weakening) is something that
happens cyclically in hurricanes anyway:

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/reso...-15-eyewall-re
placement_x.htm

BTW, hurricanes draw energy from the circulation of winds which
is caused by the rotation of the Earth. So maybe Pat Robertson
should try to do a Joshua-at-the-walls-of-Jericho and make the
earth stand still. Hey, it's worth a shot.


And if you read the discussions on the NHC website (www.nhc.noaa.gov, the
archived discussions for Katrina are particularly interesting) they note
that eyewall replacement cycles are not such a great thing since the wind
speed decreases but the storm diameter increases (all things conserve
energy and momentum) so the destructive radius is bigger.

I think that saying hurricanes draw energy from the Earth's rotation is a
bit misleading. A hurricane's energy comes from evaporating water and then
convecting it aloft where it condenses into rain releasing heat that drives
more convection. The wind that is air moving in to replace the air that
convected upwards starts to spin because of the Coriolis acceleration, but
I don't think the hurricane really draws a lot of energy out of that
acceleration. In the absence of Coriolis it is likely you wouldn't form a
nice cyclonic storm since that is what organizes the convection and keeps
it spinning, but the convection would still happen since the energy (in the
form of warm water) is still there.

Anyway, from a heat budget of the planet perspective it is not entirely
clear you want to stop hurricanes. They transport a substantial amount of
heat pole-ward from the equatorial regions and it isn't clear what would
happen if they were suppressed. Besides, the ones we get here are piddly
stuff compared to the super typhoons that hit Asia and you don't hear them
wanting to lob nukes in the ocean. At the Joint Typhoon Warning Center's
website (https://metoc.npmoc.navy.mil/jtwc.html) you can take a look at
some archived satellite images from storms that have hit Japan recently.

e.g., http://tinyurl.com/7sa9x
(ok, this is from a NOAA website, but JTWC has archived images too)

--
Bill Asher

Osama Bin Ladin must be loving his new weather machine!! He keeps sending
hurricanes to the Yanks!!!


"crit PRO" wrote in message
oups.com...
Wouldn't that put a stop to her?

cp #5

Kurgan Gringioni says...

today's supercomputers are way, way, way too slow
to run the simulation.

I'll tell that to some of the guys and gals that make their living simulating
hurricanes with supercomputers. I'm sure your opinion will render them invalid.

Stu Fleming wrote:
Meanwhile, Swiss Re's prediction from last year is looking solid...
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0303-07.htm

Dumbass,

Someone needs to tell the dumbasses at Swiss Re about sunspots.
It is incredible how stupid these people are. Someone that is
never wrong(*) told me it was all about sunspots.

Bob Schwartz


(*) At least that they've admitted.