In June 2020, the United States Congress introduced a bill “to prohibit the President from deploying any strategic weapon, such as a nuclear bomb, for purposes of altering weather patterns.”
Blowing up a tropical storm sounds like a plot pulled straight from a dystopian science fiction novel, although I have to admit it's very on-brand for 2020. But is it even possible to tame a hurricane by nuking it? Can we really control the weather?
Before we dig into that question, let's define some types of storms.
What's the difference between a typhoon and a hurricane?
To understand whether or not we can control a storm, we need to understand what makes that storm so powerful.
Tropical cyclones are thunderstorms fueled by temperature differences in the layers of atmosphere that sit over tropical waters, which is to say waters within 25 degrees of the equator. When a tropical cyclone has winds that reach speeds of 39 miles per hour (that’s about 17 meters per second), the storm is officially upgraded to a tropical storm and the World Meteorological Organization gives it a name.
If those winds reach speeds over 74 miles per hour, the tropical storm is upgraded again. If it forms in the Atlantic or East Pacific, it’s called a hurricane. If it grows out of the Northern West Pacific, it’s called a typhoon. The Saffir-Simpson scale then further denotes the storm’s strength based on its wind speed: a category 5 hurricane, for example, is the strongest hurricane, with wind speeds reaching over 157 mph. Category 3-5 hurricanes are classified as "major," and they're capable of causing catastrophic damage.
A single hurricane can release 200 times the electrical generating capacity of the entire world.
Hurricanes produce an incredible amount of energy. The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory—that’s a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States—estimates that a single hurricane can release ...
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