CAN SCIENTISTS STOP OR REDUCE THE TORNADOES AND HURRICANES?

A view of Hurricane Sandy from GOES East satellite-Credit: NASA GOES East, Stuart Rankin via Flickr

To save lives and reduce costs, there would be tremendous advantage if science had a way to stop a devastating hurricane like Sandy. And scientists have thought of it before. One idea that rears its head almost every hurricane season recently is the notion of bombing a hurricane into submission. The theory goes that the energy released by a nuclear bomb detonated just above and ahead of the eye of a storm would heat the cooler air there, disrupting the storm’s convection current. Unfortunately, this idea, which has been around in some form since the 1960s, wouldn’t work.