Re: Why don't we nuke Rita?

"Kurgan Gringioni" <kgringioni@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1127365384.724951.273190@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

>
> 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.
>

That figure for the wind speed is right at the explosion site. Farther
out it is much less.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/pdfs/7906.pdf
(see Table 3 on page 18)

A few things about that table, it is for a 1 MT burst at 8,000 ft
altitude (and most warheads nowadays are considerably smaller, not
larger, than 1 MT (e.g., the Peacekeeper warheads are on the order of 400
kT and Trident warheads maybe 100 kT (*and*, I might add, I based my
initial calculations roughly on a bomb the size of the Oak test of
Operation Hardtack and that was around 10 MT (and the largest bomb ever
was a Soviet one of maybe 50 MT so it is not like you are going to get
orders of magnitude larger warheads)))). Secondly, at distances typical
of the radii of a large tropical cyclone (maybe 10 miles), the blast wind
is trivial compared to the eyewall wind velocity (which I recall as being
essentially the maximum velocity in the storm). Furthermore, as I
mentioned, wind speeds of the same order of magnitude as the maximum wind
speeds in that table have been measured inside the convecting clouds
inside the eye, so it is not like you are exposing the storm to something
it doesn't already get exposed to (and it is late so I am going to end
that sentence with a preposition, *** you Mr Grammar Person). Finally,
the blast overpressure from an airburst is a short-duration event. The
blast wave from an underwater detonation is even less intense and since
only about 35% of a blasts energy comes off directly as heat there isn't
enough energy to make a difference to the moisture flux. You need to
face facts that a nuclear burst simply doesn't have enough energy for a
hurricane to even feel for an instant, especially when you consider I
wrote "minutes" instead of "seconds" in my initial analysis.

Hurricane Charley in 2004 was likened to the finger of god being dragged
across Florida because it was so intense and compact. Katrina and Rita
are like the fists of Thor, and the biggest baddest nuke on the planet
would do ***-all to storms of that size. You can't fool with mother
nature.

--
Bill Asher
.