Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB
John: When you consider that Hurric an S andy caused at least $80 billion in damage to NY, NJ and Conn plus the negative impact on people (as a victim I can attest and my neighbor totally lost their uninsured home at the Jersey shore) it is clear that the topic raised here is of extreme importance. Hurricanes are extremely costly in general and the negative impact on quality of life is growing rapidly . F rom a localized in time perspective the topic raised here is incredibly important; I would argue more important than climate control in the near term . T he costs, the distractions and the impacts on humans are immense. Hurricane modification research can be a winner and would certainly enhance the view of geoengineering's importance and its ability to get funding later to focus on climate control. I applaud the interest being illustrated here. -gene - Original Message - From: John Latham john.latha...@manchester.ac.uk To: Mike MacCracken mmacc...@comcast.net, Kelly Wanser kelly.wan...@gmail.com, Armand Neukermans arma...@sbcglobal.net Cc: Geoengineering Geoengineering@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, December 7, 2012 10:17:22 PM Subject: RE: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB Many Thanks, Mike. Interesting! Should certainly be looked in to. 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 From: Mike MacCracken [mmacc...@comcast.net] Sent: 08 December 2012 01:19 To: John Latham; Kelly Wanser; Armand Neukermans Cc: Geoengineering Subject: Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB
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 -- 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 The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB
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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
RE: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB
Gene, I share your sentiments entirely. Taking Sandy's $80 billion + with concomitant personal agonies, add to that, from a few weeks later, the tragic loss of more than 500 lives in the Phillipines, and extrapolate into the future, we create an utterly devastating picture. Our problem is that we have no significant funding., so our rate of progress with this work is substantially and increasingly slowed down. We need to complete the development of our spraying system, extend our computations, in several directions including a thorough examination of possible adverse consequences and associated remedial action: and we need to field-test the system over a limited oceanic area, on a scale of perhaps 100km, and build the required number of spray-ships. A rough estimate of costs for a fully functioning operational full-scale system averaged over 20 years is not more than $100M per year. Any suggestions as to how to procure the required support would be most welcome. Best Wishes, 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 From: euggor...@comcast.net [euggor...@comcast.net] Sent: 08 December 2012 15:59 To: John Latham Cc: Geoengineering; Mike MacCracken; Kelly Wanser; Armand Neukermans Subject: Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB John: When you consider that Hurrican Sandy caused at least $80 billion in damage to NY, NJ and Conn plus the negative impact on people (as a victim I can attest and my neighbor totally lost their uninsured home at the Jersey shore) it is clear that the topic raised here is of extreme importance. Hurricanes are extremely costly in general and the negative impact on quality of life is growing rapidly. From a localized in time perspective the topic raised here is incredibly important; I would argue more important than climate control in the near term. The costs, the distractions and the impacts on humans are immense. Hurricane modification research can be a winner and would certainly enhance the view of geoengineering's importance and its ability to get funding later to focus on climate control. I applaud the interest being illustrated here. -gene From: John Latham john.latha...@manchester.ac.uk To: Mike MacCracken mmacc...@comcast.net, Kelly Wanser kelly.wan...@gmail.com, Armand Neukermans arma...@sbcglobal.net Cc: Geoengineering Geoengineering@googlegroups.com Sent: Friday, December 7, 2012 10:17:22 PM Subject: RE: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB Many Thanks, Mike. Interesting! Should certainly be looked in to. 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 From: Mike MacCracken [mmacc...@comcast.net] Sent: 08 December 2012 01:19 To: John Latham; Kelly Wanser; Armand Neukermans Cc: Geoengineering Subject: Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB 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
Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB
Hi Stephen--Thanks for suggestion. I wonder, however, if one cools one spot, they will just form somewhere else--tropical cyclones in the Pacific don't seem to need the Sahara to be generating eddies to get them going. And, actually, Mercator does shrink the tropics, and to have a feel for how much, the area of Greenland is actually half the size of India. Alternatively, Greenland (so the block of ice keeping us from experiencing a 6-7 meter sea level rise) is only about the size of Libya, Mexico, or Saudi Arabia. Mike On 12/8/12 10:29 AM, Stephen Salter s.sal...@ed.ac.uk wrote: 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB
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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
RE: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB
Many Thanks, Mike. Interesting! Should certainly be looked in to. 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 From: Mike MacCracken [mmacc...@comcast.net] Sent: 08 December 2012 01:19 To: John Latham; Kelly Wanser; Armand Neukermans Cc: Geoengineering Subject: Re: [geo] Hurricane weakening via Marine Cloud Brightening MCB 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 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups geoengineering group. To post to this group, send email to geoengineering@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to geoengineering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/geoengineering?hl=en.
