Jonah Goldberg can have his airborne volcano-lancing laser, but for the GWOW – Global War on Weather – give me a fast jet (and a refueling tanker):
In a patent application, (University of Akron Professor Arkadii) Leonov and colleagues say that they can put a spanner in the atmospheric works by flying supersonic jet aircraft in concentric circles around a hurricane’s eye, the calm area around which the storm rotates.
The idea is that the sonic-boom shockwave would dramatically raise air pressure in the eye, disrupting the upward flow of warm air that drives the hurricane.
File under GIIW – Great if it Works.
File under GSTBTP – Gotta suck to be THAT pilot.
Um… do we have anything that actually qualifies as long-duration supersonic?
We did, but then we just retired it…
It’ll probably give the guys at Belle chasse NAS in New Orleans some more holes in the sky to bore……
File under: WWWPF
Will-Work-When-Pigs-Fly.
I know that massaging the patent bureaucracy is an art, but…
This guy is telling us that a jet – hell, an ARMADA of supersonic jets – has enough energy to impart a significant impedence close to the inner concentric, isobaric low-pressure systems that generate the angular momentum of a HURRICANE?!
Humph. I won’t be impressed until they develop a hypersonic jet that can travel in a retrograde orbit to go back in time.
I dunno – it may be that this person thinks they’ve found the weak point of the hurricane – it’s fuel supply. Cut that off and it dies into a disorganized series of storms.
I see someone recommended using F22’s over at the original article, since they supercruise… but isn’t their shape also designed to minimize the shockwave that is desired?
File it under:
PHNSS
People Have No Sense of Scale
There was a Museum of Natural History guard who was asked to fill in on a tour. He got to the dinosaur exhibit and pointed at it, telling the group, “That dinosaur is 20 million and seventeen years old.” One of the group, apparently shocked, asked, “How can they know so well how old it is?” The guard said, ” I am not sure of the details, but when I started here they told me it was 20 million years old, and that was seventeen years ago.”
Great idea, now if only we had ten thousand jets with ten hours endurance that could turn ten mile circles at 10.0M we would be so there.
Supersonic in a constant turn … small diameter turn, too … constant high g = weary. High altitude approach to the eye? And a high altitude departure .. fuel mgt will be a challenge… hitting the key for the penetration and the climbout will not be trivial. Minor mistake and the rivets have to replaced.
The boom pressure pattern is a “N” – high pressure followed by low pressure. The boom does not ‘raise the pressure’ – it only creates a transient pressure peak/valley sequence. How that might possibly disrupt a massive hurricane is beyond my limited comprehension.
It’s either the cleverest or the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. My money is on the latter.
Betcha Al Gore thought of it first…
LOL, Byron. With no knowledge of supersonic planes and such, I was thinking this sounded an awful lot like the “science” I’ve read on global warming.
Oldschool, that pressure spike radiates outward as a wave of high amplitude. It’s a sonic boom, after all — all sound is a pressure wave in the air of a particular frequency and amplitude. The amplitude, or energy, of a sonic boom is pretty impressive. It’ll break windows and rattle your teeth from quite a ways away. A few miles, anyway.
I’m not so sure a hurricane is going to be, you know, impressed. You’d have to disrupt the airflow in a very precise manner to break up a hurricane.
Also strikes me that this isn’t anything that couldn’t be done with some big ol’ firecrackers. Drop a cardboard tube of TNT about the size of a 5-gallon bucket out the door, let a GPS system determine when it’s near the point it should detonate… Ya could drop a whole lotta bucket bombs for what it would cost to keep a fast-mover above mach. Safer too.
Make the cardboard wrapper pink and green, too. That way, if it doesn’t work, the resulting confetti will make the hurricane too embarassed to be seen on dry land.
— Max
Max,
Make the cardboard wrapper pink and green, too. That way, if it doesn’t work, the resulting confetti will make the hurricane too embarassed to be seen on dry land.
Sounds Like Kitty all grown up.
Lex,
I like the gold watch on the banner.
Max,
If you make the confetti pink and green, the hurricane will just head to Miami.
Woohoo, Akron U. represent!