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Why can't we control the weather?

The reality is we already do — with varying degrees of success — through seeding clouds, clearing fog from airports and suppressing hail. But taking more dramatic steps, such as attempting to weaken a hurricane or change its path, is enormously controversial.

"Whatever is done will need to withstand the inevitable scrutiny of scientists the world over," said Peter Ray, a meteorology professor at Florida State University. "There will be plenty of people, and probably plenty of lawyers, who would be happy to claim that whatever you do is bad rather than good. ... Were you to shift the track of a hurricane from, say, Fort Myers to Tampa, the Tampa folks would have a problem with that."

Weather-modification research still is in its infancy, having been largely stalled over the past 20 years. In fact, only a few scientists now work in the field. And while federal funding for such efforts peaked at $19 million a year in the 1970s, it has plummeted to less than $500,000.

Peer pressure

There can also be considerable peer pressure against researchers who pursue such work.

While still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 25 years ago, Ross Hoffman proposed a thesis on tweaking weather models to calculate the smallest change necessary to intercept a cold front traveling north and send it eastward instead. His advisers counseled against it as "too risky."

That attitude, he said, is largely unchanged.

"It sort of got a bad name, and that's unfortunate," said Hoffman, now 55 and a principal scientist for the consulting firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, based in Lexington, Mass. "It is a reasonable thing to do research on, and yet young scientists are steered away from it — as I was."

One reason is the daunting complexity of violent weather, where the tiniest of changes can result in large shifts in direction and intensity. Not only is there the danger of causing unintentional damage to another city or state or country, but no one really knows whether squelching a pattern of hurricanes might, for instance, dry up drinking-water supplies in places such as Florida that depend on hurricanes to replenish the aquifer.

Amateurs, on the other hand, are not bound by such realities. They contact hurricane tracking centers and research divisions with a crop of often-outlandish schemes.

Energy megabursts

The heat released from a fully developed hurricane, it turns out, is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. The energy produced is roughly four times greater than all the energy — electricity, gasoline, etc. — the entire world consumes at any given time.

To stop such a phenomenon, scientists agree, is impossible. But slowing it to a less-destructive scale is another matter.

In that pursuit, proposals have included everything from erecting giant windmills onshore — the equivalent of a gnat taking on a DC-10 — to towing icebergs to the tropics in an effort to cool sea-surface temperatures, thus cutting off a storm's energy supply. That notion, Ray said, never has gotten much traction.

"You would have to tow a lot of icebergs," he said. "In fact, you might have to tow Antarctica."

But the premise — cooling surface temperatures — is sound. Hurricanes feed on warm waters, and small changes can weaken or steer even a large storm. One theory, then, is to coat the ocean's surface with a thin layer of biodegradable oil, thus reducing evaporation.

Working the inside

Another notion is to tweak air temperatures inside a storm, prompting shifts in the hurricane's path and a drop in wind speed.

In the October issue of Scientific American, Hoffman describes an experiment using a computer model of Hurricane Andrew, which struck South Florida in August 1992, killing 23 people and causing about $35 billion in damage. By making tiny adjustments outside the hurricane's eye, sometimes fractions of a degree, he was able to slow the virtual storm enough that, by the time it made landfall, its damaging winds — greater than 56 mph — were quieted.

But the trick, of course, is how to prompt such a change. "Undoubtedly," Hoffman acknowledged, "the energy required to do so would be huge."

To that end, he proposes using an array of Earth-orbiting solar "power stations" that employ giant mirrors to focus sunlight on solar cells and then beam the collected energy to receivers on Earth.

If it sounds outlandish, consider that his work is supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts and that he was a member of the recent National Research Council committee studying the future of U.S. weather-modification efforts.

Besides, stranger theories abound.

One comes from a South Florida businessman named Peter Cordani and a company called Dyn-O-Mat, which features a caped crusader on its logo.

It's ... Dyn-O-Gel!

Cordani, a 43-year-old Long Island transplant, for years has been making bold predictions about the hurricane-blunting powers of a product named Dyn-O-Gel, for which he holds the patent. The polymer, capable of absorbing great amounts of moisture, initially was employed in the company's creation of a household and industrial mat that could soak up everything from leaking engine oil to pet urine.

Although he has no scientific background, Cordani claims to have put together a team of scientists who "say it's one of the most amazing finds there's ever been in history."

His parent company recently forged an agreement with Oregon-based Evergreen International Aviation to use one of Evergreen's new "supertankers," a modified 747 that can carry a payload of 115 tons of Dyn-O-Gel powder and inject it into the storm, robbing the hurricane of moisture and heat. The resulting gel then would fall to the sea, where the salt water would liquefy it instantly.

The basic ingredients have been studied by the Environmental Protection Agency, which determined they were benign. Cordani wants to use his product on a violent cyclone such as Ivan and knock it down a category at a time until it is a mere tropical storm — or better yet, catch it in its earlier stages to prevent it from reaching maturity.

To do that, he acknowledged, will take an awful lot of Dyn-O-Gel — researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimate it would take a prohibitive 37,699 tons, delivered into the storm every hour and a half. Of course, their calculations were based on a powder that can absorb 2,000 times its weight, and Cordani says his company since has made the product twice as effective.

Nonetheless, Dyn-O-Mat has faced a series of financial challenges in recent years, including numerous tax liens and a lawsuit last summer by a finance company to collect $26,000. Cordani admits that startup costs have been steep but says the creditor was paid and the company now is in fine financial shape.

And the idea has its supporters — Ray among them, even if his enthusiasm is tempered by caution.

"Realistically, a lot of hard, important science has to be done before anything could ever be done in nature," Ray said. But given the enormous destructive potential of a hurricane, he added, "It's worth starting down that path, and if the results don't pan out, well, then the results don't pan out. Then you know."

Skeptics' view

Despite Cordani's rosy projections of softening the blow of a Frances or Ivan in the near future, researchers say it will be decades or even a century before that's possible.

Skeptics say it will be even longer, if ever.

"None of the techniques or ideas that are currently being proposed are feasible in the real world any time soon," said Ava Reich, spokeswoman for the International Hurricane Research Center in Miami. There, scientists are studying such things as cost-effective ways to improve construction in hurricane-prone areas, beach erosion and developing better flood- and evacuation-zone maps.

"Maybe somebody would come up with a theory that shows promise," Reich said. "But the amount of money and time it would take to develop and test it in any sort of meaningful way would be better spent on the work we're already doing on the ground."

Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company