What would we need to stop a hurricane?
In Star Trek TNG, you hear about some sort of defense back on earth that is supposed to screen out all the bad weather. In the episode "True Q," it is mentioned several times as being capable of preventing/stopping a tornado.
Obviously such a system isn't possible today, but what would we need to stop a hurricane? What would we need to accomplish in order to stop/prevent a hurricane?
Clarity: This is science-based. I know we can't do this right now, so I'm looking for what we would need to cause. How we cause that is another matter entirely. (For example, maybe a drop in air pressure somewhere solves the whole thing. How we do that comes later.)
1 answer
What a hurricane boils down to is a large difference in air pressure between two parts of the earth. Air from the high-pressure region attempts to move toward the low pressure region. Along the way, coriolis forces influence its path and it ends up spiraling around the center of the low pressure. As the difference in pressure becomes larger, the velocity of the winds becomes higher.
Now, what if there were a way to let the air move from high to low without the coriolis effect standing in its way? A tunnel from the outside edge to the eye could do this. The air would still try to turn on its way through the tunnel, but the walls would get in the way and force the air to move along the path of the tunnel. This would allow the pressures to equalize without the resulting massive spiral of fast moving, destructive winds. The very things that gave birth to the hurricane likewise serve to kill it.
But wait, it's not as easy as it sounds. You are going to have trouble with scale and location. You need a really long tunnel, because hurricanes are many miles in diameter. Your tunnel needs to be very sturdy, as the winds rushing through it will be even stronger than in the hurricane itself. Finally, hurricanes tend to form over oceans, so your tunnel has to float. I'm not sure if any modern materials will meet these requirements. All this ignores how you are going to get your tunnel to the emerging hurricane in time to break it up.
Possible? Maybe, no-one has tested it yet. Practical? I have doubts.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/57711. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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