Activate Cloud Shield! Zap a Twister!
Source: Earth Radio
If the US Air Force is to be believed, illegal drugs
aren’t going away anytime soon. In fact, in the future they’ll only
cause more problems, because the distributing cartels will have
consolidated. They’ll have wealth,
political power, and, instead of a few guys with submachine guns,
entire armies.
Picture, then, a South American cartel of the
mid-2090’s. It maintains hundreds of fighter planes, thwarting attacks
by launching a dozen Russian-and Chinese-made aircraft for every one
of ours. Our sole advantage comes from a piece of military
intelligence: Cartel pilots won’t fly in harsh
weather. But this doesn’t mean waiting around for the skies to turn -
because by then, thunderstorms will be made to order.
First we launch uninhabited aerospace vehicles (UAVs),
which, through advanced cloud-generation technology, disseminate
cirrus clouds to block enemy surveillance. Next we seed any one of the
daily rain showers passing through the region, intensifying it
precisely over the target. Then we snuff
out our blinded enemy.
Over the course of the next century, the weather will be
our most powerful weapon. So says Weather as a Force Multiplier:
Owning the Weather in 2025, part of a 1996 Air Force-commissioned
report forecasting the technology required to maintain US air and
space leadership into the next century.
"Current technologies that will mature over the next 30 years will
offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify
weather patterns, at least on the local scale," the study says.
"Weather modification can provide battlespace dominance to a degree
never before imagined. By 2025 it will be within the realm of
possibility."
Sound like hyperbole? Ironically, three years after the
report was issued, that’s what Air Force officials would have you
think. "We have no plans to try and modify the weather. It’s just too
much of a crapshoot in terms of the
complex dynamics and huge energy involved," says Brigadier General
Fred P. Lewis, the Air Force’s director of weather. "How will you
guarantee the outcome? How will you create what you want yet avoid
kicking off an undesirable or even dangerous weather system?"
Made-to-order thunderstorms, says the military, "can
provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined."
Whatever the truth about the military’s attitude toward
weather modification, the private sector won’t wait for Lewis to
answer his own questions. One sign of real-world progress has come in
a rather ancient-sounding technology:
cloud seeding. Introduced in the 1940s, the tactic has made huge leaps
of late thanks to a new method known as hydroscopic seeding. In the
early ’90s, South African researchers began using flares shot from
planes to inject water-attracting salts into clouds. In these and
other tests, hydroscopic seeding has shown evidence of increasing not
only the amount of rainfall, but also the duration and vertical
concentration of individual storms.
The most extensive hydroscopic test to date, being
conducted in Mexico by scientists from the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, has been running for three
years. So far, 99 seeding missions have shown rainfall increases of as
much as 40 percent, according to head researcher Brant Foote. Another
50 tests with the same results, Foote says,
and he’ll consider the evidence conclusive.
While Foote and the military talk of weather
enhancement, some of the most important developments are coming in
weather suppression. One factor pushing those developments is the ever
increasing density of Earth’s population. Not only does it amplify the
need to move water to drought-afflicted areas, it
also intensifies the amount of damage natural disasters wreak.
Weather-related catastrophes caused $92 billion in damage worldwide
during 1998 and displaced more than 300 million people from their
homes, according to the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC. Top
priority: Mother Nature’s ultimate terror, the hurricane.
Hurricanes are fueled by the evaporation of warm ocean
water. One way to kill a storm would be to cool the ocean. Given the
huge energy investment of, say, towing icebergs, however, researchers
have made little progress in this
regard. Pushing a hurricane toward land would also kill the storm by
eliminating its energy source - but also threaten people and property.
That’s not an option, of course. But can we make a hurricane think
it’s over land?
A team of MIT scientists believes so. Led by professor
Kerry Emanuel, the scientists are hoping that by applying a chemical
coat one molecule thick to the ocean’s surface, they can retard the
natural heat-transfer process that
occurs during evaporation, which would slow the storm. Team member
Moshe Alamaro tests materials by pouring tiny amounts of various
biodegradable, oily substances into a special test rig filled with
seawater. To see how this monolayer material would stand up in the
ocean, he agitates the water with a paddle wheel. It’s an arduous
process. "There are 10,000 types of oil, all with different
properties," he says. "We need to have something with a diffusion rate
faster than the rate at which waves break, a film that will repair
itself quickly."
Using oil to suppress evaporation could also help
protect reservoirs. That prospect has attracted attention from
Chevron, which has supplied a number of possible monolayer materials
and shown an interest in giving the MIT group startup funding. But the
team’s real hope is one day to spread a monolayer over several hundred
miles of ocean in the path of a hurricane, stopping it before it can
reach land.
Getting to that point will require a lot more research.
The ways ocean spray and wind fuel hurricanes are not fully
understood, and some think that smoothing the sea with oil might
reduce surface drag and actually intensify the storm. The MIT
researchers are constructing a second test rig,
incorporating a wind tunnel, to investigate these phenomena.
Their work to date has attracted the interest of
Vladimir Pudov, a leading weather-modification scientist from Russia
who has expressed interest in joining forces with MIT. According to
the recently declassified results of Soviet experiments during the
1980s, Pudov made significant progress in
evaporation suppression in the South Pacific.
Rather than coating the ocean surface, Pudov sought a
substance that would dissolve in it - and he claims to have developed
the ideal compound: a low-cost, ecologically safe, fine white powder
called carmidol. "Carmidol suppresses evaporation by no less than 65
percent," he says. "This leads to a decrease of water-air temperature
difference and a decrease of the energy flow into the hurricane."
While Alamaro is guarded in his optimism about Pudov’s
claims, he’s excited about the prospect of working with someone
committed enough to navigate a ship into a tropical cyclone for the
sake of research. "He is a brave man. He
gathered crucial data on a storm’s thermodynamics and physics, and on
ocean spray," says Alamaro of Pudov’s trip to the Sulawesi Sea. "But
the storm had only 70-mile-per-hour winds. Someone has to go into a
real hurricane. When you have money, you can do a lot of things that
are otherwise not possible.
We’re working on a shoestring, and it’s getting short."
A standard tropical storm has the energy of 10,000
one-megaton hydrogen bombs. Unlike the MIT crew, Bernard Eastlund, a
former research manager at the US Atomic Energy Commission, wants to
fight power with power. Eastlund researched the construction of a
missile shield for the Department of Defense during the ’80s as part
of the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars. His plan was to
superheat the atmosphere at an altitude of 70 kilometers with an array
of microwave transmitters, creating a shield of electrons that would
prove lethal to incoming missiles.
"Weather modification offers a dilemma not unlike the
splitting of the atom. Even if we have no intention of using it,
others will."
The death of the Cold War squelched interest in that
project, but in 1998 the European Space Agency asked Eastlund to
consider potential applications for solar-power satellites - orbiting
power stations that would absorb energy
from the sun and deliver it via microwave beams to receiving stations
on Earth. He immediately thought of weather modification and devised a
plan for the Thunderstorm Solar Power Satellite, which would be used
primarily to snuff out tornadoes, but could also zap hurricanes and
even nudge the atmospheric polar jet stream in an effort to prevent
flood rains.
Here’s how it would work: Suppose an embryonic tornado
is spotted somewhere in America’s heartland. A couple of satellites
with suitable orbits would be instructed to break off power
transmission and switch their microwave transmitters from the usual
operating frequency of 2.5 GHz - which allows
microwaves to pass unimpeded through clouds and rain, delivering
electrical power in any weather - to at least 30 GHz. At these
frequencies, Eastlund says, clouds and rain absorb microwaves and heat
up. As he envisions it, the satellites would wheel around to warm an
area of the storm, suppressing the downdrafts that drive tornado
formation.
Although such a scenario sounds far-fetched, Eastlund
suggests the main hindrance is not microwave or satellite technology
but the limitations of meteorology - an assertion echoed by the Air
Force study, in which bullish
conclusions also presuppose certain advancements in chaos theory. The
solution, in other words, will come not from more sophisticated
spaceware but from better weather-predicting software and more
computing power. "You’ve got to have a very good idea of cause and
effect," Eastlund says. "I consider
computer simulation an important enabler."
In the end, the biggest impediment to weather
modification may turn out to be culture, not science. The Air Force
report acknowledges the controversy inherent in futzing with Mother
Nature, but concludes that we have no choice
but to press on. "Weather modification offers a dilemma not unlike the
splitting of the atom," the study says. "The lessons of history
indicate a real weather-modification capability will eventually exist
despite the risk. The drive exists. The motivation exists. The
potential benefits and power are extremely lucrative and alluring for
those who have the resources to develop it. We cannot afford to be
without a weather-modification capability once the technology is
developed and used by others. Even if we have no intention of using
it, others will."
MIT’s Alamaro agrees. The benefits far outweigh the
repercussions. "If the hurricane that hit Miami in 1926 hit today, it
would cause $75 billion in damage, and New Orleans would be wiped off
the map," he says. Indeed, the danger of altering the weather may be
surpassed only by the danger of letting nature run its course.
MORE:
National Center for Atmospheric Research
www.ncar.ucar.edu MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary
Sciences www-eaps.mit.edu US Air Force research paper, "Weather as a
Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025"
tuvok.au.af.mil/au/2025/volume3/chap15/v3c15-1.htm
Eastlund Scientific’s Electromagnetic Radiation project
www.eastlundscience.com/currentd.html
Tom Standage (tomstandage@economist.com) is a science
correspondent in London with The Economist.
By Tom Standage
http://www.earthradioTV.com