Assignment#1
Diffusing a Super Cyclone by degrading it to a normal oceanic depression!Like “Taming a wild elephant”
Super cyclone and its horrific impacts are well known
especially for those residing in coastal areas of India. Now a days, the Met
department is somewhat accurately able to monitor and forecast the cyclones
using satellite data and advanced technologies. Its formation, movements and timing
etc. are closely being tracked, but the focus is somehow to manage the cyclone
and its impacts after it makes a landfall. There is no step that has been taken
in the direction to reduce the intensity before it becomes a super cyclone. Can
we somehow diffuse the cyclone by reducing its intensity or change its
direction such that the life and financial damage is minimized, or can it be
broken down into multiple smaller parts so that the intensity is reduced. Longer,
the cyclone remains above sea it captures more moisture and its intensity
increases. Can somehow it be pushed towards the nearest land area by changing
its direction so that it loses its power, or can its kinetic power be preserved
or transformed for normal human usage. Unfortunately, no such major scientific
breakthrough has been achieved so far in this direction.
A super cyclone is basically formed from a tropical oceanic
depression in Indian ocean. While normal depressions are desirable to get the
required amount of rain fall in the coastal areas, their transformation into
super cyclones are the most disastrous ones. In 1999 Odisha super cyclone was
the most intense super cyclone in the Indian ocean damaging $4.44 billion,
30,000 fatalities, wide spread flooding, damaging 1.6 million homes (source: wiki).
Several cyclones have hit coastal India like Laila, Nilam, Helen, Lehar,
Hudhud, Fani etc. just to name a few. States like Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh,
Odisha, Wet Bengal have repeatedly been coming under red alert during these
cyclones. Dec 2016, Vardha super cyclone crossed eastern coast of India close
to Chennai caused $3.35 billion damage leaving hundreds of deaths and thousands
of homeless. Recently in April 2019 Fani an extremely sever cyclonic storm
strike, coast of Odisha, AP, WB, Sri Lanka due to which 1.2 million residents
from vulnerable coastal areas have been evacuated and rehalbitated causing
$1.8billion damage and an estimation shown $11 billion would be required for the
restoration process.
Personally, I have witnessed three cyclones including 1999
super cyclone. Every time the news comes about cyclone there is fear and panic,
how the millions of people will be evacuated. How suddenly people would leave
their village, animals and all their belongings to move to another place. The
wind speed at more than 250 KM per hour destroys almost everything, it uproots
several trees, towers, buildings. Many villages and towns get disconnected with
rest of the world in terms of communication and it takes months to get back the
electricity but still it takes years for the life to come back to normalcy. Fatalities
during the cyclone is high and the post impact is also sever as it follows
major flooding and post flooding problems.
Some of the major achievements that Indian government has
been able to achieve in terms of mass evacuation, reduce life casualties to
almost zero, rehalbitation, relief process, and faster restoration etc. But still today in many places these measures
are not adequate. May be more due diligence, planning and pre-preparation would
be required. Even after so many cyclonic impacts, there is no initiative for underground
electrification, quick restoration of basic needs including drinking water.
India is not alone; many other countries globally face such
storms and cyclones time to time. In Pacific and Atlantics typhoon and
hurricanes make even bigger damage to mankind. The global climate change including
atmospheric composition, global average temperatures, ocean conditions, and
others can be blamed for such events.
Some research has shown that the green house effect, EI Nino
phenomenon etc has increased the intensity and frequency of such oceanic storms
and cyclones and we are going to face more number of such devastations in
twenty first century!
Therefore, scientists, researchers, geologists,
international communities and everyone have to come together to find better
solution towards solving this challenge in a better way. May be innovative
business models, could bring the required thrust and inquisite towards finding
the right solution of this problem.
Some of the
methods proposed over Internet by many people and scientists across the globe:
Method #1: Fly
Supersonic Jets in to the eye of super cyclone
No guarantee, this can not be made with a demo – How can you
compare the power of a couple F-14s with 10^13 Watts. Flying at eyewall the
turbulence is a great way to destroy a couple of airplanes and end the lives of
their pilots.
Method #2: Use a
Giant Funnel to Divert Warm Water into the Ocean
I think the warm water will always try to go up (that’s
natural) in contrast to how it is shown in the video that the warm water will
flow down inside the funnel. Not sure what mechanism the funnel should have and
how many such funnels required.
Method #3: Seed
super cyclones/hurricanes with silver iodide, in the hopes of
strengthening the clouds around the hurricane and creating an "outer
eyewall."
Method #4: Blowing the hurricane apart with hydrogen
bombs
Method #5: Bombard
Lasers
Why it is not solved yet?
- Complex and expensive – experiments or demo to conduct not easy!
- As massive amount of energy swirling around, how would you measure if your method has some positive or negative impact or not.
- These are "massive geophysical events" whose size and complexity are even bigger than most people realize. So, is it better not to mess around with complex geophysical phenomena without knowing what we're doing?
- It might create an effect that's worse than the problem that we are trying to solve.
- With our current state of knowledge, we are still not able to accurately predict which depressions will turn to super cyclone, as I said before all oceanic depressions are not bad, in fact they are required for maintaining the required level of rain fall and moisture level in the coastal areas.
- Is the real answer is "to focus on living with nature rather than trying to do gee whiz science to modify super cyclones."
https://siworkshop.blogspot.com/2019/07/diffusing-super-cyclone-by-degrading-it.html
Thank you for reading and please provide your valuable feedback.
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