For two decades, a bold and promising experiment sought to answer a wild question: Could scientists artificially weaken hurricanes before they bring devastation to U.S. shores?
By Scott Dance
But now, as the threat of rapidly intensifying and catastrophic hurricanes grows, some want to give the idea of disrupting a storm — still far-fetched, but perhaps more necessary than ever — another shot. They are pitching new technologies and approaches that, while intriguing to some experts, also underscore how daunting, costly and dangerous it could be to try to control nature.
A Norwegian company wants to employ devices it says could cool Atlantic surface waters ahead of storms. The Japanese government is funding research to modify typhoons as part of a program tackling some of the biggest threats to humanity. And there are meanwhile broader efforts to engineer a cooler climate and weaker storms, including a White House-sponsored effort to study how blocking out some planet-heating sunlight could slow or reverse human-caused climate change.
The concept of altering the weather — technically called weather modification — has increasingly entered the public imagination, especially as warming temperatures have fueled stronger hurricanes and heavier downpours. The idea of using nuclear weapons to fight hurricanes drew some attention after a 2019 report that then-President Donald Trump suggested it, something he denied. Dangerous research to weaken tornadoes is central to the plot of the movie “Twisters” released this summer.
“We really love to control our surroundings,” said Jill Trepanier, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University.
But stopping a storm has never become reality.
“The record of weather modification is exaggerated claims and failure, universally,” said Hugh Willoughby, a professor at Florida International University who worked on NOAA’s Stormfury project.
That could change with the right innovation, Willoughby added. The question is, have we discovered it yet?
Promising results, and then failure
The idea behind Stormfury was to determine whether scientists could weaken a hurricane’s eyewall, where its strongest and most damaging winds are concentrated.
Aircraft would inject a storm with silver iodide, a substance that can actually incite precipitation — a practice commonly known as cloud seeding. That would cause a new, wider eye to form around a hurricane’s center, which would gradually replace the old one. In the process, the storm’s strongest winds would slacken, at least briefly.
The theory was put into action in the 1960s when scientists tested it on four separate hurricanes. And early results appeared to back up scientists’ theory: Half of the time, winds decreased by between 10 and 30 percent, according to NOAA.
But as meteorologists studied hurricanes in the years and decades that followed, they realized: Maybe there was nothing artificial about that weakening at all.
They saw that many storms not included in the experiment underwent similar eyewall replacement processes. Scientists now know it’s a common phenomenon, making it impossible to know if the interventions had any actual effect.
“You couldn’t tell it from what would happen naturally,” said Willoughby, who went on to lead NOAA’s hurricane research division from 1995 to 2002.
Stormfury disbanded in the early 1980s after a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that a better understanding of hurricanes was needed before continuing the research. NOAA no longer conducts any research aimed at modifying hurricanes, officials said.
Instead, its research is focused on improving forecasts. The agency’s messaging promotes better preparation for inevitable storms.
“The best way to minimize the damage of hurricanes is to learn to co-exist with them,” NOAA says on its website.
Could new technologies succeed?
For some researchers, that isn’t enough.
A growing number of hurricanes are rapidly intensifying into major storms before making landfall in the Caribbean and on U.S. shores. Persistent and astonishing warmth in the Atlantic basin, providing ample fuel for hurricanes, raised fears of a historic storm season this year, though an unexpected lull in tropical weather has called that into question.
It was the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that sparked Olav Hollingsaeter to consider how to combat storms. Now CEO of Norway-based OceanTherm, Hollingsaeter is among those exploring whether there is a way to weaken hurricanes from beneath — tapping colder, deeper stores of water to sap storms of energy — rather than from the sky.
OceanTherm’s idea is to use what it calls “bubble curtains” that would use air bubbling from perforated pipes to carry colder waters upward to mix with warmer waters near the surface. They would be installed at depths of several hundred feet ahead of hurricane season in storm-prone areas, and places where ocean currents could carry the cooler waters across wider swaths of the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico or Caribbean Sea.
It’s a technology that has been used for decades in Norway to mix fresh surface waters with saltier waters beneath them and prevent narrow fjords from freezing, Hollingsaeter said. Salt water has a lower freezing point than fresh water.
That same technology used to preempt the freezing, the company says, could be used to cool waters to prevent storms.
The company estimates it would cost on the order of $1 billion to install the devices across enough of the Atlantic basin to be effective, he said. A 2019 test conducted in Norway suggested it could cool surface waters by several degrees — a change that would reduce the amount of energy available for storms to unleash. But more modeling and testing are needed to determine how impactful the technology could be in waters around Florida, for example.
“It actually looks like it’s plausible,” said Mark Bourassa, a meteorology professor at Florida State University. Bourassa is working with OceanTherm, though he doesn’t have any formal role with the company.
It’s not a totally new idea — the Gates Foundation drew attention in 2009 when it sought patents for technology to pump cold water to the surface and send warm waters deeper ahead of a hurricane. Another company, New Mexico-based Atmocean, proposed similar technology that could also help store planet-warming carbon dioxide deep in the oceans. Neither initiative has advanced to practical use.
In Japan, scientists are meanwhile exploring the possibilities of controlling and modifying the weather, including typhoons, as soon as 2050 as part of a lofty national initiative known as the Moonshot Research and Development Program.
As part of the program, researchers are exploring all kinds of strategies besides potential water-cooling technologies, from cloud seeding to wind barriers and wind turbines that might redirect and weaken storms. They are also investigating how forecasting could be improved in a way that can help better judge when human intervention could make a difference.
Moonshot organizers suggest some intervention could have a “butterfly effect,” where a small action triggers atmospheric changes that amount to significant control over the weather.
For some, any idea is ‘hopeless’
Even if such solutions can be found, their potential unintended consequences still give scientists pause.
Moshe Alamaro, a retired research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among those who participated in a 2008 workshop convened by the Department of Homeland Security to spotlight the possibilities and, perhaps, promise of hurricane modification. But he has since changed his mind on the idea.
Even if a plan could work, he wondered, what would happen if an altered storm spared one community but went on to kill people somewhere else? What if a modified typhoon blew past Japan only to hit North Korea? “You would get World War III,” he said.
“I was foolish enough to think it would work,” Alamaro said. “I came to the conclusion that it’s hopeless. The only remedy is not to build near shore and improve construction standards.”
Until further testing of ideas can happen, the totality of potentially dangerous consequences on ecosystems, wildlife, fisheries and crops remain unclear. If human intervention were to cool Gulf surface waters, for example, it could have effects on weather across the United States and beyond, Willoughby said.
“Where do you think the rain that causes crops to grow in the American heartland comes from?” he asked.
Scientifically, it’s also impossible to prove any intervention works, Trepanier said. An experiment requires a control, so that scientists can see what would have happened had they not intervened.
And then there are the sheer logistical challenges. Hurricanes are massive systems, releasing amounts of energy on par with what the world’s electrical grids are capable of carrying. Research has suggested that even an immense amount of energy put toward weakening a hurricane could only marginally reduce its intensity.
And besides, that energy must be transferred somehow, or else it would simply keep building up in the tropics and overheat them, Trepanier said. Hurricanes are nature’s way of redistributing that energy. If we somehow stopped a hurricane from unleashing that energy, the next one might be even bigger.
In explaining why NOAA no longer conducts experiments to alter hurricanes, agency officials say altering a hurricane would require scientific advancements we can still only dream of.
“Maybe the time will come when men and women can travel at nearly the speed of light to the stars,” officials wrote on a NOAA website answering common questions about hurricanes. “We will then have enough energy for brute-force intervention in hurricane dynamics.”
