Can we avoid hurricanes?

Last week the United States was hit by hurricane Harvey, the most expensive "natural disaster" in the history of the northern country, with damages already exceeding the sum of those caused by hurricanes Sandy and Katrina. A few days ago Irma became the most powerful hurricane ever seen. The damage caused by the two hurricanes could reach 290 billion dollars, an equivalent to 1.5 points of United States Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to a report from the private meteorological service AccuWeather. Faced with this grim reality, the question arises once again: Do we have the technology to prevent and avoid hurricanes?.

We interviewed Charly Karamanian, a reference on sustainable innovation, creator of La Casa G: La Casa Sustentable en Argentina and one of the winners of NASA Space Poop Challenge, to comment on the technologies that are being developed in the world to mitigate the consequences of climate change and particularly the ones which could prevent hurricanes.

Before answering if we can avoid hurricanes, we must ask ourselves if we should do so and if we have really explored and exhausted all possible alternatives to minimize their unwanted effects. Hurricanes provide moisture to places on the planet that would otherwise be desert areas and also carry heat from the equator to the poles; avoiding them would have unimaginable consequences. On the other hand, it is estimated that human activity is responsible for more than 30% increase in the intensity of hurricanes and yet we continue to promote the oil economy and build our cities in coastal areas, gaining land to rivers and seas, sometimes destroying deltas and mangroves that form a natural barrier against floods and hurricanes.

As humanity we have a Plan A: we need to stop climate change immediately by ceasing greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, many scientists argue that we have already passed the point of no return and some have already begun to work on a Plan B: Geoengineering technologies for Carbon Dioxide Recover (CDR). Some are also working on a Plan C, which involves even more radical geoengineering technologies such as Solar Radiation Management (SRM). Let's look at the advances in the early detection of hurricanes and some solutions from the simplest to the most complex.

Hurricane forecast and early warning.

Predicting which tropical disturbances will turn into hurricanes and accurately forecasting their route and intensity is one of the major challenges of modern science. The earlier the alert, the less human and material losses we have to regret. In this case the complexity derives from the famous butterfly effect, formulated by the American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz in 1963. When a small initial disturbance occurs in a complex and unstable system like the weather, an amplification process can generate a considerable and unexpected large outcome in the short or medium term. 85% of the hurricanes arriving to the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are generated by tropical waves that travel from Africa to the west and can be originated by events as simple as a cloud of dust caused by the play of a group of children in the Sahara desert.

The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has an army of experts who rely on data provided by satellites, radars, ships, buoys, and storm-fighter jets. These sources are combined to measure parameters such as wind, temperature and even dust and ice particles present in the atmosphere. Once the hurricane is formed, all these variables feed some complex simulation and forecast models.

Rendering of the GOES-R satellite. Source: NASA.

From above, there are two kinds of space satellites providing information such as size, cloudiness or density of hurricanes: polar orbits (with updates each time they rotate around the Earth at altitudes of 700 to 1,000 kilometers) and geostationary satellites that works from a fixed position above the equator, approximately at 36,000 kilometers from sea level. Both offer information on the intensity of the phenomenon and allow us to keep track of hurricanes. The GOES-R (16) was launched in November 2016 and is the first of a new generation of NASA-built and NOAA-operated geostationary satellites to obtain information from anywhere in the world in just 15 minutes or less; a 60-fold improvement to previous climate forecasts. This same satellite will benefit our National Weather Service (Argentina) from November and is responsible for the success on evacuating Miami in time for Irma's arrival.

On the near future, the lower costs of launching space cargo through the use of reusable rockets and the constellations of low-cost Nanosatellites, such as the CubeSat, will improve the variety and amount of available data. Drones capable of monitoring subtle changes in the atmosphere from two to three kilometers above the sea level, one of the weaknesses of ground instruments and satellites, are also being tested. Finally, all this information will be processed in real time on the new generation of quantum computers and we will be able to predict meteorological phenomena with unprecedented accuracy using "deep learning" (a particular type of artificial intelligence).

Technologies to fight hurricanes.

Artificial seeding. In the 1960s, the US government carried out project Stormfury, which consisted of seeding silver iodide crystals over the clouds expecting to widen the radius of the hurricanes’ eye and thereby reducing the speed of the winds. Clouds contain small droplets of super cold water, which remains at liquid state below zero degrees Celsius and are too light to fall like rain or snow. When seeding the clouds, the water freezes over the crystals, becoming large enough to fall like rain.

Project Team Stormfury 1966. Source: NOAA.

Silver iodide is usually sprinkled from aircraft or launched by rockets like those used at the opening of Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. On the night of the ceremony, 100 mm of rain fell on the neighboring city of Baoding, where 1,100 rockets were launched in an effort to intercept and unleash showers before they reached Beijing. Initially Stromfury's results were encouraging, but in the 1980s the project was canceled by proving that there was not enough cold water inside the hurricanes to have a significant effect.

Lasers for storms. This technology was proposed in 2010 by Jerome Kasparian from the University of Geneva, Switzerland. The concept is similar to the previous one. The laser would displace electrons from the atoms of the air, forming positively charged particles that help to generate tiny "seeds" around which ice or raindrops could grow.

Salter Sinks. Source: Intellectual Ventures.

Salter Sinks. This idea was patented in 2009 by Stephen Salter with the support of Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold of Intellectual Ventures. It consists of a series of 100 meters diameter pools that take advantage of the power of the waves to push a cylinder that raises the coldest water from the depth of the ocean, reducing the surface temperature that feeds the most devastating hurricanes. For the concept to work, thousands of these sinks should be placed at "the hurricanes alley" (Atlantic region around the equator where the worst storms form), some months before the start of the hurricane season (spring season), and have to be removed just before the arrival of the great storms. In addition to being a relatively environmentally friendly solution, the cost would be far less than the damage caused by just one of these storms and could be financed by insurance companies whose risk would be reduced by the deployment of the new system. Alan Blumberg of the Stevens Institute of technology presented a similar idea called "hurricane slayer", which uses a conventional water pump.

Technologies to harness energy from hurricanes.

Hurricanes works as thermal engines dispensing as much energy as 10,000 nuclear bombs. Their fuel is the heat trapped in the oceans. According to the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, an average hurricane can produce a kinetic energy level equivalent to half of the world's electricity generation capacity.

Off-shore wind generators.

Marc Jacobson from Stanford University published a study using an advanced meteorological computer model that shows that the installation of an array of offshore wind generators (300+ GW installed capacity) could provide clean electricity throughout the year and also may diminish peak near-surface hurricane wind speeds by 25–41 m s?1 (56–92 mph) and storm surge by 6–79%. It also estimated that the net cost of the turbine arrays (capital plus operation cost less cost reduction from electricity generation and from health, climate, and hurricane damage avoidance) to be less than today’s fossil fuel electricity generation net cost in these regions and less than the net cost of seawalls used solely to avoid storm surge damage.

Atsushi Shimizy, CEO and founder of Challenergy. Source: Challenergy.

Working on the same direction, Japanese engineer Atsushi Shimizu with his startup Challenergy, created the first typhoon-proof wind turbine. Japan receives between three and seven typhoons per year and imports 80 percent of its energy. A single typhoon has the potential to provide Japan with clean energy for up to 50 years. Shimizu's invention still has to face a real typhoon, but the tests have been very promising.

Plan C: Managing Solar Radiation (SRM).

According to a research published in 2015 on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), if we release sulfate gases (aerosols) into the upper atmosphere, we could cool our oceans enough to halve the number of major hurricanes over the next 50 years. The method would require a total of 10 billion tons of sulfates to run, that’s an amount comparable to the sulfate released by several tens or hundreds of volcanic eruptions. Sulfates are known to block some wavelengths of light, so doing this would reduce the heat on the area, but the difference in luminosity would be virtually imperceptible to the human eye and could even be beneficial to plants. However this solution has a glitch; sending that amount of sulfates into the atmosphere could create new holes in the ozone layer, and that would expose us to higher solar radiation. Other gas mixtures with the advantages of sulfates but without its caveats are being tested. Once again Intellectual Ventures is working on a viable SRM solution known as Stratoshield.

Stratoshield aerosol system. Source: Intellectual Ventures.

From my role of environmentalist, I believe we must make our best efforts to comply with Plan A, which implies to immediately stop greenhouse gases emissions. As a technologist and from a more realistic point of view, I think we should start to massively deploy CDR technologies which would allow us to recover excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and start focusing on the development of technologies to harness the power of hurricanes, thus achieving more resilient coastal cities.

Translated from an interview to Charly Karamanian, published by journalist Jesica Rizzo on the 11th of September 2017 - La Nacion Newspaper.