Summers like this one are especially brutal. Surely there must be some way of breaking up a high pressure system, isn’t there?
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The issue is scale. Weather systems are *really big*, like… bigly big.
Imagine you are sitting on the beach in front of the ocean and the tide is coming in to swamp your sandcastle. Would you ask if there is a way to move the tide somewhere else?
It is possible to scoop water up in a cup but wanting to move the top layer of the ocean away is just beyond human capabilities. Similarly a high pressure system is a vast region of air that is already naturally moving to equalize itself. Humans just won’t really make a dent in that.
Weather manipulation is HARD! The simple fact is that it’s too big for us to reasonably affect (other than by changing the chemical composition of air/clouds).
At normal atmospheric pressure (~100,000 N/m^2) there are 10 ,000 tons of “air” on every square meter (9 square feet). Moving that much air would take 2 giant container ships (panamax is 5000 TEU) of air for a single square meter. We can move air, but not that much of it.
Manipulation with chemicals is easier, but not very successful. Cloud seeding can allow us to redirect clouds, but we can’t “create” clouds or change air currents.
There’s not a way to “break them up” that doesn’t result in even worse problems.
If you try to cool hot-air systems you just end up with even more heat in the atmosphere overall, all of our cooling systems are net heat producers.
If you try to heat cold-air systems you create storms and eventually run out of cold air at that amount of energy input.
Physically disrupting them (say giant walls or pillars) would cause ecological disasters from disrupted global wind currents and generate EXTREMELY high winds as all that moving air squeezes itself through available openings between pillars or around the giant wall.
*Warning, I got pretty bored and started doing basic math for a non-existent scenario. I’m also not an engineer so the math is very generic and simplified.*
There’s also the problem of how we would build such mega structures without them immediately collapsing under their own weight or being destroyed by the absolutely mind-boggling forces/energy involved. A 10 mph wind creates roughly .4 lbs per square foot of pressure on a flat, vertical surface near sea level. A wall only 100 ft high will generate roughly 2,000 lb-ft of torque on the base, per foot of wall length. That’s 40 ft/lbs of torque from the top foot. The amount of force imparted by the wind drops as the air thins with altitude, but the length of the lever arm just gets longer and longer as well. Say we made the wall half the height some storm clouds reached and stopped at 30,000 feet. A 10 mph wind at that altitude produces only 0.00376 lbs / square foot of force. But that’s 112.78 ft/lbs of torque at the base. For the top foot of the wall. Each foot below that only drops by about 0.01 ft/lbs of torque. All adding together. Plus the weight of the wall itself. In a mild breeze, not storm winds. Bump that air speed at 30,000 feet to just 30 mph and the torque jumps to 1,000 ft/lbs (0.0338 lb/sq ft wind pressure) for the top foot of wall. 30 mph is on the low end for winds at that altitude. Jet streams at 35,000 have been clocked at over 200 mph.
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