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
Using silver oxide to try and break up hurricane clouds would be like trying to redirect a freight train with a BB gun
The average hurricane expends 200x the energy that we produce on earth, per day. Much of that energy comes from the warmth of the ocean. I.E. you’re talking about using a picket fence to stop an avalanche.
Very unlikely it would be effective, but here’s the catch: how much is needed to register in a hurricane? What I mean is, we take 500 mg of Tylenol and not 5 mg of Tylenol for a reason.
Are we talking tons, tens of tons, or hundreds of tons per square mile? Do we seed it in the eye, near the eye, or closer to the outside rim?
We’ve done experimentation already but because these hurricanes aren’t fans of repeating the paths of other hurricanes they were inconclusive at best. But we have to consider the idea that the volume necessary to weaken hurricanes might either be a) impossible to manufacture affordably, b) logistically impossible to seed effectively, or c) not even the right chemical compound to use because of either reason. And all of this before getting all of that to the hurricane, which if you look at projects may not be where we’d like in the hours it might take to move the material.
We don’t really “get rid of clouds” with silver oxide.
To get rain, you need two things. A lot of moisture in the air ready to condense, and a ‘nucleation point’. That is something for the moisture to condense *on*. Most of the time it is dust up in the atmosphere. That is why raindrops leave little pools of dirt on a car hood. It’s the dust they formed around being left behind when the water dries.
Silver Oxide being dropped into clouds is just giving it nucleation points to form around, allowing people to cause the rain to happen where they want. This can get rid of all the “extra” moisture, but the cloud will likely still be there, unless they use enough silver oxide to grab ALL of the moisture in the cloud and drop it on the fields.
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The primary condition that causes hurricanes is warm ocean surface temprature. Huge amounts of water evaporate into the air- millions of tons of water. That water also carries heat- energy. Cloud seeding can shift the balance between conditions where a cloud can almost form and when a cloud forms. And under certain conditions, that can cause it to turn into a rain cloud. But the input of water and heat pouring off the ocean in the conditions that lead to a hurricane is enormous. There is not a subtle balance to shift, there is a torrent. All the water that dumps torrential floods across hundreds of miles of land *rises up from the ocean first*. Making it rain slightly earlier isn’t going to help, it is dumping millions of tons of rain into the ocean while it is still intensifying.
Silver oxide can’t stop a hurricane. Cool oceans, dusty desert air, wind shear, and strong upper level winds stop hurricanes. Cool oceans or dusty air starve hurricanes of fuel, and the right winds can break the structure of the hurricane. When any of these happen naturally, nearby hurricanes weaken or dissipate (fall apart).
Using one of those – cooling the ocean, bringing in a *lot* of dry desert air, drying the air over the ocean, or creating the perfect wind would stop a hurricane, but we can’t do any of them yet. And we’d have to do it on on a really big scale to stop a hurricane.
We have tried in the past to use cloud seeding to weaken hurricanes. [It didn’t work.](https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hrd_sub/modification.html) We don’t try to weaken hurricanes, because we have no effective way to do it.
I do kind of want to see what would happen if the eye of a hurricane went over an iceberg, though. I know it wouldn’t weaken the hurricane and it would be really difficult for us to put an iceberg in the path of a hurricane, but I wonder what would happen. I’m picturing something like the [cow scene](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BZqrV1J9Rds) from Twister, but with an iceberg instead of a cow.
The ELI5 method is you can stop a wave by breaking it early by making the ground shallower (shallow beaches are way smoother near shore) but you can’t stop a tsunami that way because it is just a huge amount of water rushing in, not a single wave.
First, “cloud seeding” can be done on a small, local scale to make clouds rain. You might do this in drought areas under emergency conditions, but it’s not considered reliable or affordable (silver is expensive and a little toxic in nature). Second, hurricanes already rain, and it doesn’t slow them down a bit. Third, from Milton’s main cyclone to the northwest end of the cloud cover over Miami right now is almost 1,000 miles wide.
It’s easy to forget just how big the sea is. You can drive a high-speed boat out into the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line until you run out of gas and never see another sign of humanity. Spraying all that with enough silver salts to change a 180mph storm is practically a world-building project.
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