Credit: ESA/NASA–A. Gerst
A new study out of Arizona State University makes a provocative claim: that humanity might have the technologies needed to steer hurricanes away from populated areas.
If we could make it happen, steering hurricanes could save countless lives and property. The NOAA says that climate change is increasing the severity of storms, making the biggest hurricanes a larger proportion of all storms. Since a large hurricane can claim hundreds of lives and destroy tens of billions of dollars in value, that’s obviously got a lot of people taking notice.
The paper, published in the journal PLOS Water, doesn’t actually propose a single, definitive answer to the question of how to steer a hurricane. Instead, it proposes that it might be possible to trigger the release of rain using existing cloud seeding technologies.
The researchers titled their paper, “Weather Jiu-Jitsu: Prospects for atmospheric nudging to defuse the impact of catastrophic weather extremes.” By jiu-jitsu, they refer to the ability of a well-placed maneuver to use relatively little force to redirect a larger force, within certain bounds.
And a hurricane is quite a large force, indeed. Hurricanes carry incalculable amounts of kinetic energy, often stymying attempts to quantify their power by size and complexity alone. How could simple cloud seeding steer something that large?
The researchers believe it all has to do with pressure. By scattering certain iodide compounds at specific altitudes, weather engineers can induce rain in many cases and, as a result, change atmospheric pressure.
The aftermath of Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten.
Credit: Ministry of Defense, Netherlands
They primarily used a resource called the Aurora deep-learning Earth system model, which means their evidence is entirely derived from a machine-learning simulation. That said, the simulation seemed to suggest that seeding in 2012 could have deflected Hurricane Sandy enough to cause it to miss New York City.
The study also claims the model predicts the ability to raise the coldest temperature during a 2021 freezing event in Texas by about 18 degrees Fahrenheit, and to reduce rainfall during the 2022 California flood season by about 5%.
It’s also possible that the research is misguided, and that current technologies can’t steer hurricanes, as the authors hope. Katja Friedrich, an atmospheric and oceanic scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, told USA Today via email that “there is currently NO scientific evidence” supporting the idea that existing cloud-seeding technologies can achieve control over large-scale weather systems.
This is exactly the sort of idea that AI models can be good for: proposing something that humans likely wouldn’t have thought of, or which they would have discarded as soon as they thought of it. Of course, it could also be leading scientists on a wild goose chase, with no savings at all on the other end.
Hurricanes are inherently difficult to predict and study. This paper leaves the door open for other techniques to achieve their goals, saying that cloud seeding is a promising but not guaranteed technology. They seem adamant that something will work eventually, though.
Steering hurricanes may actually be one of the least controversial uses for cloud seeding, since many people will be inherently worried about anything that changes such a major component of a local climate as the weather itself. Saving major cities from hundred-billion-dollar disasters, though? If it actually works, you’re not likely to see too much pushback on that.
