Can a hurricane be stopped? This is the science answer

The high cost of hurricanes in the United States 1:46

(CNN Spanish) --

We arrived at the Moon.

We clone living beings.

We created a vaccine against a deadly virus in record time.

Scientific advances have surpassed science fiction time and time again, but there is one phenomenon that humans cannot beat: hurricanes.

Each season, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) receives between three and four dozen emails from people concerned about the ferocity of these weather events, Dennis Feltgen, of the public affairs area, told CNN in 2019. of the institution.

His question, reportedly also raised by former President Donald Trump (although he denied it), is why you can't attack hurricanes with a nuclear bomb.

The NHC's answer is clear: it won't work.

• How do hurricanes form and why are they so dangerous?

Feltgen and his team list all the reasons why typical "hurricane modification" tactics don't work.

They all come back to the same point: Hurricanes are much larger and more powerful than most people can conceptualize, and the energy they carry is "immense in terms of human experience."

"As carefully reasoned as some of these suggestions are, they all share the same deficiency: they do not appreciate the size and power of tropical cyclones," says the response that the institution provided to CNN.

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The NHC also maintains a comprehensive Hurricane FAQ page that goes into more detail about why dropping bombs on storms wouldn't slow them down and could create even more problems.

"Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would move quickly enough with the trade winds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems," the explanation begins.

"Needless to say, it's not a good idea."

There's more than one way to (try to) stop a hurricane

The nuclear option is not the only one people are suggesting.

The Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) maintains a whole list of discredited methods like seeding storms with silver iodide or hydroscopic particles or putting things on the ocean surface to prevent evaporation, cool the water surface with icebergs.

• What types of hurricanes are there and what do categories 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 mean?

Such a wide range of storm prevention proposals is a testament to people's concern and ingenuity, if not necessarily their scientific acumen.

However, there was a time...

Yet scientists were once united in the madness to bombard, coat, coax, inoculate, or find another way to avoid gigantic weather events.

From 1962 to 1983, the US government ran Project Stormfury, an attempt to weaken tropical storms by seeding them with silver iodide.

The project involved dumping containers of the material out of the eyewall of a storm in the hope that the chemical reaction would freeze the waters within the storm, disrupting its formation.

At first, the project seemed to work!

Some hurricanes seemed to weaken under Stormfury's wrath, but over time researchers realized there was no defensible connection between the methods and the outcome of the storm.

The illusion of success was instead a case of confirmation bias, with the Hurricanes going to do whatever they wanted to do regardless.

Hey, you never know if you don't try.

Editor's Note:

This article was originally published in 2019.