Mike
Go to http://csc.noaa.gov/hurricanes/# open the hurricanes tab
and look at the map.
They start in quite a tight bunch off Conakry and then diverge. The
'primary school' is about 2000 by 1000 km.
NOAA will not assign a line to to them until they get to some agreed
size. If you look at the directions they point to a 'nursery' a bit to
east south-east, maybe off the Ivory Coast.
I would say that Mercator is fine at the tropics but expands the high
latitudes. I am trying to get climate modellers to use six views using
the Lambert azimuthal projection with more sensible colours for contours
but it might be easier to stop mature hurricanes.
Stephen
--
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design School of Engineering
University of Edinburgh Mayfield Road Edinburgh EH9 3JL Scotland
s.sal...@ed.ac.uk Tel +44 (0)131 650 5704 Cell 07795 203 195
WWW.see.ed.ac.uk/~shs
On 08/12/2012 14:31, Mike MacCracken wrote:
Hi Stephen--While I agree it would be easier to get them early, the
challenge is that they can generate over a quite large area (Mercator maps
make the tropics look smaller than they really are) and so it almost seems
that limiting them (except perhaps in their later stages in the Gulf of
Mexico or Caribbean) is limiting full global warming.
In addition, hurricanes do a lot of ocean stirring that brings up colder
waters. Kerry Emanuel has argued it might be that the limiting process in
the meridional overturning circulation is not the creation of cold enough
water to sink in the North Atlantic, but the difficulty of bringing cold
water back to the surface in low latitudes, and it might be that hurricanes
are vital in this process; slowing the overturning would thus contribute to
warming of the North Atlantic. So, hurricanes and tropical cyclones might be
vital. Now, he also has indicated that he has had trouble convincing
colleagues of this, so just a thought. But, it is worth thinking about
whether hurricanes are a necessary component of carrying energy away from
the equator and toward the poles. If that is the case, then what one might
want to do is to steer them away from key areas.
On the issue of not dealing with hurricanes once developed due to liability,
that has indeed been the case--but that was also when models were not good
enough to forecast the track, and so it could be argued (even if not
convincingly in a scientific sense) that even something minor caused the
hurricane to come over you and so potential legal liability arose. Models
have gotten much better at track forecasting, though not yet great on power,
so we might now be able to use models to get at the issue of whether
intervention might have an effect or not and what kind of effect, so maybe
liability might go down a bit (though one might need an insurance system to
compensate those who do get hit, paid for by those who are not hit).
In any case, I am just asking if it might make sense to think through the
idea of possible storm steering once storms develop as an alternative to
having to, for example, cool the whole southern North Atlantic Ocean. Might
this reduce damage while still letting the global system transfer heat from
low to higher latitudes as must happen somehow?
Best, Mike
On 12/8/12 7:04 AM, "Stephen Salter" <s.sal...@ed.ac.uk> wrote:
Mike
The growth of a hurricanes depends on positive feedback so it is easier
to stop them early. Once they are really going people are terrified of
legal liability and so do nothing.
Stephen
On 08/12/2012 01:19, Mike MacCracken wrote:
Hi John, Kelly, ad Armand--With respect to hurricane modification, there may
be an alternative approach to consider other than cooling the areas where
the hurricanes develop. Stu Ostro of The Weather Channel has written a
review of this year's hurricane season; see
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/stuostro/show.html?entrynum=18
What is interesting is that there is a channel that seems to control the
tracks of hurricanes up and into the North Atlantic where the storms
hopefully die. So, maybe an approach is to think about altering North
Atlantic temperature changes in a way that keeps hurricanes out to sea in
the Atlantic. And for Hurricane Sandy, that alters conditions in the
Labrador Sea area so that the hurricanes heading up the East Coast of North
America don't get trapped along the coast and can be blown out to sea.
Now, I know this does not benefit Caribbean island nations and so this is
likely not the only approach to be thinking about, but might it be that an
alternative approach would be to try to steer hurricanes to areas of the
ocean where coastal cities and infrastructure would not be much affected? At
least it could be evaluated if this might be easier, at least during some
years.
Mike MacCracken
On 12/7/12 1:41 PM, "John Latham" <john.latha...@manchester.ac.uk> wrote:
Hello All,
Regarding the unfortunately topical issues of hurricane strength and damage,
I attach a press release written by our MCB colleague Kelly Wanser,
describing our work on the possibility of weakening hurricanes via MCB: and
also our recently published paper on the same topic.
All Best, John.
John Latham
Address: P.O. Box 3000,MMM,NCAR,Boulder,CO 80307-3000
Email: lat...@ucar.edu or john.latha...@manchester.ac.uk
Tel: (US-Work) 303-497-8182 or (US-Home) 303-444-2429
or (US-Cell) 303-882-0724 or (UK) 01928-730-002
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/people/latham
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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