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WiseQuakker
Joined: 21 Aug 2000
Posts: 141
Location: Wherever I happen to be at the time |
Halting Hurricanes
 Sat Jun 22, 2002 10:25 am
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Halting hurricanes
This summer, a Florida company plans to slow down a storm and rein in the weather
by Bob Fitrakis
Like any good R&D effort, the private sector may be taking over from the government in the quest to develop (and market) technology that controls the weather. Dyn-O-Mat, the “environmental absorbent products” company based in Riviera Beach, Florida, wants, as part of its corporate mission, “to protect humanity worldwide from hurricanes and typhoons.”
Dyn-O-Mat spokesperson Louis Heidelmeier told Columbus Alive that “in a 10-day window in late July through early August” his company plans to lessen the winds of a hurricane from “135 miles an hour to 110 miles an hour.” Heidelmeier believes his company will succeed where the U.S. government’s 20-year project Storm Fury, launched between 1961 and 1980, failed.
On June 4, Dyn-O-Mat showcased an AeroGroup fleet of planes that will drop the company’s Dyn-O-Gel into a mid-summer hurricane. The man behind Dyn-O-Mat, Peter Cordani, claims each grain of Dyn-O-Gel powder “is capable of absorbing 2,000 times its weight in moisture, condensation and air.”
As Heidelmeier explains it, “The U.S. EPA has approved the two polymers we’ve combined in the powder. They don’t need to approve Dyn-O-Gel. We’ve come up with a Reese’s Cup—we’ve simply combined chocolate and peanut butter. Once the polymer absorbs the moisture, it turns into a gel and falls to earth.”
On July 16, 2001, Cordani and company loaded 20,000 pounds of Dyn-O-Gel into a C-130 jet at Palm Beach International Airport and, according to TechTV, “removed a building thunderstorm completely from the atmosphere, a first-ever feat documented by Doppler radar.”
As BBC science reporter Julian Siddle noted: “Dyn-O-Mat used a military aircraft to drop four tons of its powder onto a developing storm cloud. The cloud disappeared from radar screens.” The BBC says, “The U.S. government has already expressed interest in the new product.”
Heidelmeier says this summer’s tests will be conducted 15 miles off Florida’s shores in “international waters.” He told Alive, “We know the U.S. government is watching with interest and they haven’t done anything to stop us.”
The spokesperson dismisses environmental critics, admitting that he saw an attack on Dyn-O-Gel on the web linking the product to the unexplained “black water” mystery in the Gulf of Mexico. “It can’t be us,” Heidelmeier insists, “we were on the Atlantic side.”
Heidelmeier stresses that the unused powder either “burns up or dissolves when it hits salt water.” The powder is biodegradable and not hazardous to the environment, he claims.
Margareta-Erminia Cassani, writing on the environmental website Moonbow Media, reported, “On July 19, 2001, ABC news reported a similar story of a gelatinous ‘goo’ again washing up on beaches in West Palm Beach, Florida. This time it turns out the substance was identified as Dyn-O-Gel, a substance created for the purpose of modifying the weather… It has the ability to suck the moisture out of a hurricane and let it fall to the ground. It works on much the same principle as the ‘gel’ substance in babies’ diapers.”
Environmental reporter and watchdog Will Thomas understands why Dyn-O-Mat wants to “dial down” the catastrophic winds of hurricanes and typhoons by “sucking the moisture-fueled energy out of giant revolving storms.” Thomas points out that most of the Earth’s human population occupies coastlines within reach of ocean storms.
“This is a battle between the insurance companies that are bigger than the big oil companies driving global warming,” he said, “but such grandiose geo-engineering schemes make me nervous.”
A hurricane is the most powerful heat-venting force on the planet, according to Thomas, dissipating 25-degree Celsius surface waters. “Because no one really knows what will happen if this safety-valve is wired shut and ocean regions made even hotter, Dyn-O-Mat’s innovative storm-killing technology may prove to be dyn-o-mite in unexpected and unpleasant ways.”
“Physics teaches that energy is never destroyed—only displaced,” Thomas said. “The awesome heat-pumps disabled by Dyn-O-Mat have to go somewhere… What kind of storms will this produce? Do we really want to risk making the oceans hotter by dissipating their hurricane thermostats?”
A Dyn-O-Mat press release from Heidelmeier explains the motivation behind the company’s weather-control efforts: “Ten years ago this August, Hurricane Andrew struck Florida and Louisiana, costing over $40 billion while killing 26 and damaging or destroying over 125,000 homes (source: NOAA). Hurricane Mitch killed 15,000 in Honduras in ’98 and a typhoon in the early ’70s claimed 300,000 (!) in Bangladesh (source: National Geographic). Add the chemicals under your sink, the petroleum-based products in your garage and sewage/waste from each home and then multiply that by the number of homes destroyed by a major storm and you get an idea of the long-term environmental damage a major storm can create. NOAA has predicted nine to 13 tropical storms for 2002 with six to eight possibly becoming hurricanes and two to three could be major, (winds 111-plus mph). ...Hurricane season starts June 1.”
Heidelmeier concludes, “There is no downside.”
June 20, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Columbus Alive, Inc. All rights reserved.
[Edited 1 times, lastly by WiseQuakker on 06-22-2002] |
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haarpman
Joined: 20 Dec 2001
Posts: 51
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Sat Jun 22, 2002 1:20 pm
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Dynomat is not the only way they are "HALTING HURRICANES"..
I think YOU know what I am REFERRING to.
Wanna play a little game of "HURRICANE PINBALL"?
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Bonehead9
Joined: 08 May 2002
Posts: 176
Location: suburb of Chicago, IL US |
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Sat Jun 22, 2002 3:53 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by WiseQuakker:
“Physics teaches that energy is never destroyed—only displaced,” Thomas said. “The awesome heat-pumps disabled by Dyn-O-Mat have to go somewhere… What kind of storms will this produce? Do we really want to risk making the oceans hotter by dissipating their hurricane thermostats?”
I could not have said it better myself. This product will never fly commercially ( ).
[Edited 1 times, lastly by Bonehead9 on 06-22-2002] |
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David
Joined: 20 Oct 2000
Posts: 1381
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Sat Jun 22, 2002 5:36 pm
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It will make big winds go away,Hmmm. If we sprinkled this on bonehead.... |
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Bonehead9
Joined: 08 May 2002
Posts: 176
Location: suburb of Chicago, IL US |
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Sat Jun 22, 2002 11:01 pm
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Won't work, I ate Mexican food last night. Nothing can counteract the refried beans 
like a hurricane, it will just have to run its course |
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Dan Rockwell
Joined: 10 Dec 2001
Posts: 1988
Location: Stamford, CT, USA |
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Sun Jun 23, 2002 7:34 am
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quote:
As the sun rose on July 19, 2001, Peter J. Cordani and his team of experts were busy loading 8,000 pounds of Dyn-O-Mat® formulated polymer product into a Canberra jet airplane.
Yes! Similar test had been performed whereby the team split a fair weather cloud in half and they later took a whole cloud out of the atmosphere utilizing only 300 pounds of product dispersed by a crop duster. But now it was different! This was the big test that everyone had been working for. Would it work??
As the day continued final radio preparations were made that would allow communication between the Canberra jet, the chase plane, the boats, the controllers located in the Palm Beach International Airport tower and ground crews. All details were completed and now the entire team awaited the word from the tower that they had in fact located a building thunderstorm off the coast of Jupiter, Florida.
At approximately 3 pm EST the word came from the tower and the Canberra and the jet chase plane were cleared for take off. With runway in view the entire team looked on as the planes became airborne. The teams prayers, beliefs and hard work was now in the hands of the pilots.As the plane became airborne, radio communications began between the tower, the planes and the ground crew. The planes were vectored by tower controllers to the thunderstorm which had been sited prior to takeoff.
As the pilots sited the storm, they notified the tower and positioned themselves which would allow them to drop their payload.THEN THE COMMAND FROM THE CHASE PLANE CAME, "DROP YOUR PAYLOAD."
The product was released and word came from the controllers in the Palm Beach International Airport Tower: It's gone! The storm was on the radar screen and within seconds it disappeared. The event was also documented by local TV weather departments. The celebration began as all waited anxiously for the planes return. In searching the sky, the planes were sited and minutes later safely on the ground.
http://www.dynomat.com/storm.shtml
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penumbra
Joined: 24 Apr 2001
Posts: 672
Location: North Carolina |
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Tue Sep 24, 2002 5:01 pm
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Taking On Mother Nature
Is Science Ready to Change the Weather?
By Amanda Onion
Sept. 24 — As residents near the Gulf Coast brace for the possible oncoming blast of the storm called Isidore, researchers are busy finding ways of attacking hurricanes, rather than fleeing them.
Sometime in early October, nine massive jets will take to the skies over southern Florida. Each will carry 16,000-330,000 pounds of an unusual arsenal: cloud-busting powder.
Peter Cordani, chief executive of the Riviera Beach, Fla.-based company, Dyn-o-Mat, says that once sprayed into a wet, hovering cloud, the special powder should combine with the moisture and transform into a heavy gel. The gel will then fall harmlessly to the surface and effectively shake out moisture from the cloud.
The hope is that tons of the powder might someday be used to steal strength from an ongoing hurricane.
"Mother Nature is fooled in so many different ways every day," says Cordani, referring to other ways humans alter the planet, such as global warming and deforestation. "This is just a more obvious way. We just want to take a punch out of a storm so it doesn't level your house."
If at First You Don't Succeed...
Altering weather is something people have tried for centuries. Native Americans performed rain dances to encourage downfalls for their crops. Several governments, including the United States and Russia, began "seeding clouds" a half-century ago with silver iodide to increase local rainfall. The U.S. government even used cloud seeding to try and flood out critical paths in the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam war.
But the U.S. government mostly abandoned the concept of changing the weather in the 1970s amid criticism and when a group of prominent scientists concluded it is an impossible task or at least one whose success was impossible to prove.
"The problem is the weather changes you try and achieve by cloud seeding or other methods happen naturally all the time," says Hugh Willoughby, hurricane research director at NOAA and lead author of the report that more or less halted weather modification efforts in the 1970s. "And you can't know the difference."
Others feel we may be ready to try again.
Seeding Clouds With Fat
The Dyn-o-Mat powder consists of a polymer that's also found in fast-food french fries and as a base for pesticides in agricultural fields. It's made in cornflake-shaped flakes so it floats and lingers longer in the air to combine with a cloud's moisture. In a hurricane, the hope is the powder could be spread in cloud layers just outside the eye of the storm. By precipitating moisture out of these outer layers, moisture and energy might be sucked from the eye of the storm and weaken its overall power.
Last year, a smaller scale test indicated it made a small cloud disappear from a Doppler radar screen after jets had sprayed the substance in the vicinity.
"We know it can dissipate a cloud," says Peter Ray, a meteorologist at Florida State University who is helping test the product. "But we don't know what it will do to ice, freezing water and all the other kinds of things you might encounter in a large storm."
October's test may provide some answers since the nine, powder-stocked jets will be pursuing large storm clouds.
Besides the Dyn-o-Mat effort, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have proposed spreading a thin layer of vegetable oil on the surface of the ocean. This slick patch would hamper the exchange of air and sea, reducing evaporation and basically cutting the engine of a developing hurricane. Others have suggested that massive mirrors in space might be used to redirect sunlight and alter weather patterns by heating cool pockets.
Planting Butterflies
Such proposals may seem farfetched, but Ross Hoffman concluded in a recent bulletin of the American Meteorological Society that the dream of controlling the weather "is in fact a possibility."
The key, says the Atmospheric and Environmental Research meteorologist, is perfecting the science of weather prediction and modeling and then taking advantage of the so-called butterfly effect. The butterfly effect refers to the chaotic nature of weather and how the simple fluttering of a butterfly's wings in, say Singapore, can trigger a chain of events to change the weather thousands of miles away in New York City.
Hoffman's idea is to place an artificial butterfly effect — instigating a small change in say temperature or humidity — in strategic locations to alter the weather even great distances away.
"Small changes can result in large changes as a storm evolves. We can use that intelligently if we can predict the evolution of a storm. But we're not there yet," says Hoffman, who believes that effective weather changing techniques may be 30 years to 50 years away.
Even if stopping a hurricane in its tracks may remain a dim prospect, more humble efforts of altering the weather appear to have had true impact.
The state of North Dakota and the Canadian province of Alberta have repeatedly use cloud seeding to make hail storms less destructive. By releasing silver iodide into carefully studied clouds, meteorologists have caused ice droplets to form more quickly — and in smaller pea-sized pebbles. Weak evidence has suggested that cloud seeding projects in Florida and Texas — as well as Moscow — have worked to squeeze water out of lingering clouds, triggering more rain.
And researchers at the University of Utah say they have used similar methods to successfully clear fog around municipal and military airports.
Still, until weather forecasters get it right every time, there's no guarantee that weather-changing efforts are really working or if it's simply a quirk in the complex workings of Mother Nature. Some argue that means tinkering with powerful weather events like hurricanes remains a risky endeavor.
"If you do nothing and there's a horrible weather event, it's an act of God," says Hoffman. "But if you do something and even make matters a little better, someone may still bear a loss and they're sure to blame you."
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/weathermakers020924.html?partner=earthlink
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