Re: Why don't we nuke Rita?


William Asher wrote:
> >
> > That would be an interesting experiment.
> >
> > It wouldn't stop the hurricane though. A nuke in the eye, especially if
> > it was under water, would cause the water to heat up and the resultant
> > rise in water temperature along with the mushroom cloud rising into the
> > air would add energy to the hurricane, speeding up its "whirpool"
> > effect and increasing the velocity of the winds.
> >
> > The wind could very well temporarily go up really, really high. I think
> > we should try it.
> >
> >
> > thanks,
> >
> > K. Gringioni.
> >
>
> Not quite. You need to do the math. Your typical large nuke might release
> around 20 tera-Joules (TJ) in a fraction of a second. Divide that energy
> into the typical blast radius of make 10 km and a typical mixed
> layer depth of 100 m (assuming all that energy will be converted directly
> into heat (which is isn't)) and you get a relatively small increase in
> sea surface temperature. And the atmospheric thermal plume of a bomb burst
> is teeny tiny compared to the total area of a hurricane so it is already
> vaporizing more water than the bomb burst.
>
> You can think of it in another way by looking at the energy dynamics. The
> average power required to sustain a hurricane is on order of 1.5 tera-Watts
> (i.e., 1.5 TJ/s) and the energy it releases in the form of rain is around
> 600 tera-Watts (i.e., 600 TJ/s). So every minute (or so) a hurricane
> dissipates 30 times more energy than one big bomb and one big bomb would
> only provide enough energy for 20 minutes of hurricane force winds.



Dumbass -

Good analysis, but I wrote "temporarily".

I think the wind around the eye would go up really high (the air
rushing back into vacuum from the atmospheric tests in New Mexico were
400mph, and, as you know, those bombs were very small compared to the
multi-megaton ones we have now) for a short period of time, until the
heat dissipated. Then the hurricane would go back to its former self.


just speculating,

K. Gringioni.

.