Can we tame the storms?

Scripps Howard: Every hurricane season amateur meteorologists contact the National Hurricane Center with schemes to control or diminish the massive storms — setting off nuclear explosions, cooling the warm water on which hurricanes depend by towing icebergs into their path, seeding the clouds with chemicals, and even erecting giant fans to blow the storm away from shore.

It’s not that the government hasn’t thought about hurricane mitigation. Post-World War II there were several studies made, but the last of them, Project Stormfury, was shut down a quarter of a century ago. The problem with the ideas being studied was that they were either ineffective — cloud seeding — or colossally impractical, like those giant fans.

And as Lee Bowman of Scripps Howard News Service wrote in a report on America’s band of would-be storm breakers, there’s the law of unintended consequences. The giant storms are “a vital part of Earth’s climate controls, part of the oceans’ constant exchange of heat from the equator toward the poles.” Large regions are dependent, if often indirectly, on the storms’ prodigious rainfall for their water supply.

Weaken them?

Bowman found that a group of scientists think it’s worth another try to study ways to weaken or redirect these annual visitors. Joe Golden, a scientist at the University of Colorado, told Bowman, “ ... if we have the slightest chance to do something beneficial without harming the environment or causing some unexpected consequences, we owe it to the taxpayers to give it our best shot.”

Even a slight change in direction or a diminishing of the wind force could greatly cut down a storm’s capacity to destroy. This year the storms have already caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.

The Department of Homeland Security seems favorably disposed toward a plan by Golden and other scientist to spend $1.6 million on hurricane modeling to come up with three or four proposals meriting more detailed tests.

The scientists may not come up with the magic bullet but their storm models may significantly improve the forecasters’ powers to predict.