Effort Underway To Dismantle A Hurricane

By Daniel Hays

NU Online News Service, June 19, 9:47 a.m. EDT?Sometime this summer, a small cargo aircraft will roar off the runway in Florida, take dead aim at a seething hurricane cloud and spray it with a dose of white powder that kills or disables the storm. That's the plan at least.

The effort to slay the tempest is the project of manufacturer Peter Cordani, whose Riviera Beach, Fla. firm, Dyn-O-Mat, makes fluid absorption products. His aim is to use some of the same technology his company works with to absorb the energy of a hurricane.

"We're looking to cut a wedge out of this storm like a pizza pie. By sucking out that energy and turning that wind in, we'll break the momentum and take the punch out of it," he said.

Mr. Cordani explained that the storm will be attacked by spraying it with modified polymer particles that absorb the cloud's moisture. Four eight inch diameter pipes will blow the material, which looks like talcum, out the back of the airplane.

In previous tests, he said his team has been successful in eliminating a potential storm that was visible on Doppler radar. "We sprayed a building thunderstorm and wiped it off the radar."

While some meteorologists have expressed doubts about the feasibility of the project, scientist Peter Ray, who is doing observations and assessment of the project, said he believes it is "potentially feasible" to do something that has an effect.

Mr. Ray, with the Florida State University meteorology program, has studied severe weather for nearly 40 years. "My scientific opinion is it may not be possible to eliminate a hurricane, but to drop it from hurricane to tropical storm status," he said.

The importance of this, he explained, is that, with hurricanes, "damage goes up as a cube of wind speed."

Professor Ray noted that weather modification has had a "checkered history" with past efforts like the government's 1960's Operation Storm Fury that seeded clouds with silver iodide.

The concept, he said, was to get the storm to grow prematurely and "have the storm release its energy before it got to the center of the hurricane where it would be most destructive."

"Make the cloud big and get it over with. That's the essence of it. We now know that it had no effect," he said.

Mr. Ray said he use radar to monitor how the polymer particulates behave when dropped in the cloud and how fast they fall.

Mr. Cordani's team, he said, has "demonstrated [that] you can put some of this material in a thunderstorm and it has a dramatic effect making it disappear and dissipate rapidly."

At this point, however, scientists don't know how long the effect would last if a hurricane is treated or whether the hurricane recover if it's treated too soon. "There are a lot of issues we're trying to work through."

The proof of the effectiveness, he said, "is in whatever happens or doesn't happen. My involvement is to do the best science anybody can do and assess the outcome."

Whatever the result, it certainly will be no easy job, according to Richard Pfeffer, another professor of meteorology at Florida State University. When asked about the project, he noted by e-mail that no past attempts at weather modification, "even those by knowledgeable experts in the field, has ever brought success.

"The energy in a hurricane is enormous and?the geographic area that is involved in both the hurricane, and the incipient disturbance that leads to a hurricane, take place over a radius of more than 1,000 kilometers--a much too large area to influence."

Mr. Cordani, however, is intent on doing what he can to batter a hurricane. When it was suggested that the effort would involve a high cost, he said that $1 million would not be much of an outlay to control "something that does $40 billion in damage--and think of the lives lost."

Special Reports /

Effort Underway To Dismantle A Hurricane

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