This article does not mention silver oxide, but regardless of what chemicals are used why don’t we attempt to weaken catastrophic storms in any way?
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/jun/24/thisweekssciencequestions3](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/jun/24/thisweekssciencequestions3)
In: Planetary Science
Silver oxide has a minimal impact on clouds and rain. Hurricanes are more about the winds the rain is just a side-effect, no amount of cloud seeding will impact the winds.
Because hurricanes aren’t caused by clouds, hurricanes are caused by large scale atmospheric conditions that we cannot change. The clouds are just a by product of the hurricane.
Because a hurricane is far more complex than a simple rain cloud. A cloud is basically just water vapor and dropping the right powder in will make the vapor form bigger drops that will drop right there instead of over the concert venue.
A hurricane is a complex system of higher and lower air pressure. This pressure difference must be equalized, this causes winds and the bigger the difference, the higher the wind speeds.
the only scientist quoted in that article says:
>Anthony Illingworth, a meteorologist at Reading University, agrees: “Some people have made a lot of money out of it, but because it’s so hard to prove it’s worked, we tend to view it with considerable jaundice.”
Cool, now it rains a little harder. The 350km/h whirlwind is not affected, of course, because it’s *not a cloud*.
The clouds just make the movement of air visible.
The air is still moving and it’ll still fuck shit up.
The U.S. government did experiment with modifying hurricanes for decades, starting with the military-sponsored Project Cirrus in 1947. The Hurricane Research Division of NOAA ran Project Stormfury, which seeded hurricanes with silver iodide, in the 60s and early 70s.
The problem was that it was ultimately impossible say whether anything a storm did or didn’t do after seeding was the result of the intervention.
The theory behind cloud seeding is that the “seeds” (tiny bits of silver iodide or whatnot) encourage the formation of ice crystals, which then precipitate out as snow or rain. Ultimately, it was observed that hurricanes do not have enough supercooled water (water that is below the freezing point, but has not turned to ice yet) for that kind of seeding to work, and the program was canceled as scientifically infeasible.
See [https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/modification.html](https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/modification.html)
Do you mean Silver Iodide cloud-seeding? That’s not done to ‘get rid’ of clouds, its done to provide nucleation sites in the air for the water to condense onto, with the aim of causing a rainstorm.
Project Stormfury investigated this possibility from 1963-71. It was concluded that this strategy does not work.
Launching some chemicals into a hurricane would do nothing to stop it. Hurricanes have the energy equivalent of a 10 megaton nuclear bomb detonating every 20 minutes. Converted into Watts, it’s equal to 600 trillion watts per day. The combined output of every power plant on earth is 3.3 trillion watts. Nothing humanity has at its disposal can come close to the energy of a hurricane.
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