Ocean heat is off the charts, so where are the hurricanes? a change is coming | Hacker News Reader

Ocean heat is off the charts, so where are the hurricanes? a change is coming

cnn.com

17 pointsgardenfelder14 comments

Not looking forward to this...

I have family in Florida, and going through Irma and Ian has convinced me to never move to Florida myself.

It feels like living in the edge of a volcano, waiting for it to erupt in your direction. Its not like other states where tornados, earthquakes or whatever are spotty and statistically unlikely to hit you.

In theory, if you own property in Orlando, you are not that far off from owning beach-front property.

There's never been a better time to invest in beach futures

By hyping ocean surface temps they're only telling half the story. Raging hurricanes are driven by heat down below but they are difference engines that need >clean< cool air with some moisture above to jumpstart a strong organized storm. Dust in the air warms it and inhibits moisture and this time of year presence or absence of a Sahara dust plume is the deciding factor. Sea surface temps will always scream their readiness in the tropics but this ( https://www.trackthetropics.com/saharan-air-layer-sal-tracki... ) is your go-to map for storm likelihood. Note that between the gauntlet of dust there are only small disorganized cloud systems coming off of Africa. Looks like not for a month at least.

While heat provides the energy for hurricanes, crap in the air prevents the convection required for storms to develop and organize. The Saharan Dust Layer has been brutal this year, blowing massive amounts of dust across the Atlantic and the Gulf up into Texas, where it’s produced significantly reduced visibility and rainfall. See it here: https://www.myfoxhurricane.com/saharan_dust_car.html

When the dust stops the storms will form. And unless there is some significant pattern change that sheds a lot of ocean heat expect storms to keep forming late into the season.

As mentioned in the original linked article the thing suppressing tropical systems so far this year is wind shear

>Record-high ocean temperatures are setting the stage for an active Atlantic hurricane season with explosive tropical development, but just one thing is missing: storms. There have been no tropical storms in the Atlantic basin in nearly a month, and none so far this year have come close to the United States.

NOAA is still predicting 14-21 named storms this year. Will be interesting to see actual count and strength post season.

I've wondered whether there might be any way to dissipate the vortex in a hurricane/tornado before it hits the land.. I accept/know that it's a very large and fairly complicated thing but also maybe it doesn't really need bulk air and temperature control to alter it? Perhaps a very specific kind of large-enough knock (of air or temperature-change) to get it to destabilize and move out of its feedback loop?

People have suggested using a nuclear explosion for this. I believe "wouldn't work" and also "catastrophic mess even if it did" were the conclusions.

Yeah it certainly seems that there would be lots of things that could make things worse, like nuclear bombs! I did say 'air or temperature-change' on purpose though.

After a while I did wonder if there's such a thing as a cold-bomb.. imagining that a warm-bomb followed by a cold-bomb at specifically the right location could potentially be disruptive enough? Large-scale fluid dynamics seems very complicated though.. you're probably right there's a good chance many possible interventions might just 'add fuel to the fire' so-to-speak. I still think it's interesting to think about though.

I've read speculation that the warm ocean temperatures are due to ships at sea stopping use of high sulfur fuel recently, so perhaps releasing some sulfur (or other reflector of IR radiation) at a fairly large scale ahead of a hurricanes path might deprive it of some energy from the Sun and reduce it's intensity? Might need to be done a month in advance though and since hurricane paths are not predictable that far ahead maybe the coverage area would need to be too big for too long to be practical. There's been talk of building ships that spray ocean water into the air to reflect heat back to space as a way to cool the planet, so perhaps that would be an approach to cooling the ocean along the most likely hurricane paths into Florida and the Gulf coast and Eastern seaboard. If it worked there it could be expanded to other places.

An interesting idea for sure! Overall climate is certainly a factor but I guess I was thinking of something more localised that somehow actively (or at least strongly) disrupts the self-sustaining spinning of the vortex. Seems a bit sci-fi at this scale maybe? But humans are understanding fluid dynamics ever more.. and I wouldn't be surprised if vortices turn out to have some currently-hidden vulnerabilities.

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