Scientists Study Cloud Seeding To Steer Hurricanes Away From Cities

What if scientists could nudge a hurricane off course before it slams into a major city? It sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, but a new study says the technology to do it may not be far away.The research, published June 24 in the journal PLOS Water, argues that humans should start using technology to tame extreme weather before disasters become too much to handle.“The growing impact of weather extremes on society highlights that traditional approaches such as dams, levees, and insurance alone may not be sufficient to address the widespread consequences of these hazards,” the authors say. Their idea builds on cloud seeding, a decades-old method of changing the weather by adding tiny particles to clouds to squeeze out more rain or cut down on hail. The study suggests pairing this old technique with modern data and artificial intelligence to do something far more ambitious: shift entire storm systems away from populated areas.“We reframe the question of hurricane modification by asking whether it could be more effective to modify the steering winds of a hurricane than to modify the hurricane’s power,” the researchers say.The estimates they offer are striking. According to the study, small, carefully timed cloud seeding done days before the storm’s peak could have pushed 2012’s Superstorm Sandy about 300 miles away from New York City. The same approach, the authors say, might have warmed up the deadly 2021 Texas freeze by roughly 18 degrees and trimmed the rainfall from a 2022 California storm by about five percent.Not everyone is convinced. Several scientists say there’s simply no proof this would work on something as massive and chaotic as a hurricane.A professor of atmospheric science at the University of Colorado, Katja Friedrich, was blunt. She told USA Today there is “currently no scientific evidence” that existing cloud-seeding technology “can modify large-scale weather systems, in particular severe weather systems like hurricanes and thunderstorms.”Past attempts back up the doubters. Decades ago, researchers tried using cloud seeding to weaken hurricanes and struggled to prove it had any effect. It “is very difficult to separate the effects of human intervention from the natural variability of hurricanes,” a research scientist at Columbia University, Kara Lamb, told the newspaper.Study authors remain hopeful, and they compare their strategy to martial arts, citing jiu-jitsu as an example.“A common perception is that vast amounts of energy would be needed to induce changes in atmospheric circulation, i.e., nudging the system with small amounts of energy is not feasible. To move from this perception towards Jiu-Jitsu, we consider mid-latitude phenomena whose physics and nonlinear dynamics are relatively well understood, and whose chaotic dynamics at the time scales of interest suggest that there is an opportunity to intervene, at least for some of the extremes that would otherwise have catastrophic impacts,” the researchers wrote.“The open technical questions are (a) whether appropriately timed and placed small nudges can indeed allow controls of the trajectories of weather systems of concern, (b) how these nudges would be applied in practice, and (c) how the system would be monitored and predicted to assure that the emerging trajectories are working as intended or are updated with new nudges,” they wrote.Even if it worked, steering a storm raises tricky moral questions. Saving New York might send the storm toward New England instead. The authors say those debates are for the future.For now, cloud seeding is also fueling conspiracy theories. After the deadly 2025 Texas floods, viral posts falsely blamed a nearby seeding operation. Meteorologists said there was “zero evidence” for that claim.

Scientists Study Cloud Seeding To Steer Hurricanes Away From Cities

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