Blowing against the wind
President Trump was ridiculed for suggesting that hurricanes could be impeded on their passage across the Atlantic by bombing them. Yet there is nothing new in trying to stop or reduce the power of hurricanes by artificial means.
— Between 1962 and 1971 the US government ran an experiment called Project Stormfury to try just that. The idea was to spray the eye of a hurricane with silver iodide crystals in the hope that it would stimulate the development of a second ‘eyewall’ of cloud, in competition with the first, thereby helping to break up the storm. The method was tried on four hurricanes over eight separate days.
— Following four of those events wind speeds were measured to have fallen by between 10 and 30 per cent, and in the other cases wind speeds were unchanged.
— The project was formally stopped in 1983, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded those results had been down to chance.
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