– Why is necessary to break up a high pressure/low pressure weather system?

Question

Summers like this one are especially brutal. Surely there must be some way of breaking up a high pressure system, isn’t there?

In: 1

Answer 1

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.