Can a big shockwave disrupt a tornado and cease its formation?
In: Planetary Science
Not without doing more damage than the tornado would.
The thing that causes tornadoes is to have hot air underneath cold air, the hot air rises, the cold air sinks, and the air near the ground gets sucked towards the rising area. As this happens, the air keeps its angular momentum it started with, but because the radius is decreasing a lot, the angular velocity has to increase. A gentle rotation can become very violent.
Sure, but that “skockwave” would typically be called an “explosion”. There is a shortage of majors willing to protect their town from a tornado with a massive, multi-block destroying explosion.
The path of a tornado is very thin, so a wide area effect would cause more harm than the tornado.
The energy in a large thunderstorm is enormous, and when dealing with that amount of energy it’s very difficult to just make it “go away”.
Maybe. It is conceivable that some inverse of the Butterfly Effect (destructive interference type of air flow) could be used to interrupt the formation of a tornado. For the moment, let’s just assume this is true. The first question would be how to figure out when to do this, at what position, over what area, for what amount of time, and how much force would be needed. The second question would be to build the mechanism that would carry this out. Is there a really big fan that might be useful for this purpose and if so, how would it be moved 100’s or 1000’s of miles to follow storm fronts? If we figured out how make bombs that could do this, what kind of damage would be caused by the bombs and the inevitable accidents that would happen. The third question is who would pay for this hypothetical system.
So, in summation, maybe it would work, but we cannot figure out how to do it reliably and probably couldn’t afford it if we could.
I remember seeing a theoretical plan to stop tornadoes by releasing a bunch of liquid nitrogen from trucks. They would zap the warm air required to keep it alive. I have no idea if its realistic.
Think about the water running down your shower drain. If you want to disrupt the whirlpool effect, you can with a good kick, but it’ll reform pretty fast.
Now, your kick involved way more energy than the whirlpool, right? The atmospheric equivalent would level cities and rip roads from the ground. Levels if destruction greater than a nuclear bomb. If we even have access to that kind of power, which is unclear, we’d be doing more harm than good.
edited, see replies
Others have answered the questions about why you shouldn’t just try and bomb a tornado, but there is another really important aspect.
Tornadoes actually don’t cause that much damage. Where they hit causes a ton of damage, but the path is very small. I worked in homeowners insurance in the midwest (tornado alley) and tornadoes are the least costly natural disaster. Hurricanes, flooding, and normal windstorms cause far far more damage.
Others have talked about the scientific reasons why it wouldn’t work, but here’s another one: tornadoes are unpredictable. Yes we know a couple days in advance when we’ll get the right weather to make tornadoes, but you don’t know it’s actually formed until you see it or it’s destruction.
And then tornadoes usually don’t last very long. Long-track tornadoes are pretty rare.
So logistically, you’re either blowing up clouds that “might” cause a tornado or blowing up a tornado that’ll probably die off in a few minutes anyway. Huge waste of resources.
Tornadoes are caused by atmospheric energy. Specifically, they are caused by warm air interacting with cold air, and we’re not talking small amounts of air. We’re talking about massive amounts. Consider the largest Amazon warehouse you’ve ever seen. Now multiply that times 100. That’s how much air we’re talking about.
The tornado is just the focal point of this energy. So even if you came up with a method to disrupt the tornado, the atmosphere in the area still has all the energy and conditions needed to start the tornado right back up again.
So in order to truly stop a tornado, you need to resolve the temperature difference between two masses of air that are so large it would take an entire city’s worth of energy to make a difference. It’s just not practical.
So this was actually an idea in the 1800s, back during the Weather Bureau. A lot of people had this idea, and there were papers even written on it, that they would telegraph and have an explosion go off that would stop a tornado. It was quite popular back then. But now meteorologists know a lot better how this works.
So here’s a problem with stopping a tornado. A tornado exists because there are these different pressure gradients, and wind, and spinning of air being pulled in. And it can be a rather wide area, I mean we’re talking about several miles even, that are affected by this. On top of that, this actual vortex of a tornado, and the rotation above it, can extend upward like 30,000 feet.
So even if you did plant a huge bomb and you blew up the low-level rotation, most likely it would just reform almost immediately. In order to blow up the entire cyclone, the entire thunderstorm updraft that’s going, you know, 40,000, 50,000 feet in the sky and several miles wide, well, you’d have to blow up a hydrogen bomb. You’d have to—an incredible amount of power. That would tear apart any updraft and kill the thunderstorm, at least that’s what you’d hope would happen but watch out thunderstorms exist for a reason the entire atmosphere is unstable and there is lift so you might just end up with a thunderstorm again and a radioactive tornado
Obviously that would be more destructive than any tornado in history. So you remember when Trump wanted to nuke the the hurricane? Even a small supercell tornado can have a large depth and a large area of pressure acting on it that would be virtually unaffected by any conventional explosives. Simply the amount of energy needing to stop a tornado is not worth it.
A Type I civilization is able to access all the energy available on its planet and store it for consumption. Hypothetically, it should also be able to control natural events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.
We’re at about 0.6 or 0.7 on the Kardashev scale
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