Controlling hurricanes

[phantom power]

In a talk presented Monday at the 27th annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society's conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology, Philip Kithil of Atmocean, Inc. presented a radical idea to reduce the intensity of hurricanes approaching the coast: deploy an array of wave-activated deep ocean pumps in front of an approaching storm. These pumps would each be attached to a 1000 meter long, 1.5 meter diameter flexible tube moored to the ocean bottom. Since the water at 1 kilometer depth is up to 15 degrees C cooler than the surface water, these pumps could quickly pump enough cold water to the surface to significantly cool the surface waters. Assuming a typical 2-meter high wave, the pumps, which operate at 30% efficiency, would be able to able to pump enough cold water to the surface in a day or two to cool a 50 meter deep layer by 1 degree C. In a field test conducted near Bermuda last year, Atmocean lowered the surface temperature of ocean water by 4 degrees C using a test pump attached to a 25 cm wide, 160 meter long tube.



Could such a scheme work? Yes, but you would need a lot of these pumps. Kithil estimated that 6000 of these units would be needed, deployed in a 100 km wide band stretching across the Gulf of Mexico, each pump spaced 50-100 meters apart. The pumps would all be tethered to each other and anchored to the bottom to slow any drift that might occur from ocean currents. The pumps and flexible tubes cost about $2800 each, so we're talking a total cost of $2.4 billion for a single array stretched across the Gulf of Mexico. Additional arrays located off the Florida Atlantic coast and near the Lesser Antilles Islands would cost $2 billion or more, each. The yearly cost of maintenance and operation would be another 20% of the installation cost.

That's a pretty steep price, and makes this scheme a difficult sell. In addition to the major financial issues to overcome, the plan also has serious technical, environmental, political, and legal problems to consider.

(more about technical, environmental, political and legal problems at the link)

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=347&tstamp=200604

[NMDemDist2]

1. it would almost be cheaper to move all the houses away from the coast

and what would it do to the marine life and shipping channels

good grief

[phantom power]

2. I wonder. If you consider the cost of the 2004 and 2005 seasons...

And then consider that from here on out, every year we'll be seeing damages in the 10s of billions, a 2 billion dollar deployment starts to look cost effective.

I guess what you're saying is, move inland once, and avoid the damage. I'm sure that will be a solution for many, but I assume we'll still be running shipping ports, fisheries, etc, which cannot be moved.

As for environmental blowback, I'm starting to change my perspective. I'm not quite ready to make the final leap, but it appears that the biosphere as we know it is over. If we're forced to accept that reality, planet-scale terraforming attempts start to lose their down-side. Any blowback is unlikely to be worse than what will happen if we do nothing.

Did I say that, or just think it? This shit is right out of my old science fiction books. The scary kind. Risky, last-ditch attempts to save the planet...

[NMDemDist2]

6. it's the shipping and seaports I'm worried about. the ships can't get

in if there are cooling towers every 50M

we need to start doing something or it will quickly be taken out of our hands as the ecosystems shut down in wider and wider areas of the planet

hubby's bumper sticker idea "Where you gonna go when this planet is used up?"

:rofl:

[dcfirefighter]

3. Who's to pay?

My vote would be the landowners in the protected states, not the wage-earners in the rest of the country.

[NNadir]

4. We could power them with windmills, except off the coast of Massachusetts.

[Dead_Parrot]

9. Ouch... nt

[Gman]

5. Investing in the common good goes against RW ideology

so it will never get off the ground.

But this seems more like some 1900's era scheme that could never work anyway.

I think there are also a lot of considerations regarding upsetting ecological balances with different water temperatures.

And I wonder how it would function in 17' - 25' swwlls.

[Odin2005]

7. Clever idea.

Lets hope it works better then that attempt to weaken hurricanes by dumping iodine crystals in them back in the 70's.

[seasat]

8. It may result in a massive phytoplankton bloom.

When you pull water from that deep, you are mimicing what occurs during an upwelling event. Deep water is high in nutrients due to all the organic matter sinking from the surface. The increased nutrients in the photic zone would result in a bloom. This may be a good or bad thing depending on the area of the ocean. If you get a bloom, you'll increase solar energy absorbtion at the surface and may actually get higher heating of the surface waters. You'll also increase the dissolved and particulate organic absorption at the surface due to the higher concentration in the deep waters. The only way to avoid this would be to time the pumping exactly. Given the accuracy in predicting a storm path it sounds like this idea could actually make matters worse under some conditions.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. It could also make an oil spill an instant mega-catastrophe

Those pumps would distribute the oil quickly and efficiently, which would kill a lot of marine life before the biodegradation effects kicked in and reduced the oil to simple compounds.

It also depends on our ideas about hurricanes being close to 100% correct.

It also would reduce, not eliminate, the hurricane threat.

In spite of that, it might just be worth doing in an age that could produce 100 or more major hurricanes per ten-month hurricane season.

--p!

[DoYouEverWonder]

11. Band-aides are not going to reverse the impact

of climate change.

Something like this might fix one problem, but the impact on the environment might be even worse?

Wouldn't it be better to have a national/global campaign to cut down on emissions? It's not that hard, especially in the US where we waste so much.