Stopping a Tornado….
On a previous post entitled Military Unintelligence huskysooner and I discussed some smaller military weapons…….
Since huskysooner is the “Weather Dude” of this blog, this question is for him (or anyone who wants to chime in)…… Would a large artillery shell fired into an active tornado cause an explosion that could disrupt the air flow sufficiently enough to “kill” the tornado?……. Some of these tornadoes travel well over 50-90 miles and are on the ground many hours, plenty of time to zero-in an artillery piece…… Seems the destruction caused by the big gun would be a lot less than the destruction that is being caused by the tornado…….
Take the May 3, 1999 tornado in Oklahoma…… If this idea is/was feasible, that tornado could have been “Killed” before it hit the Moore/OKC/Midwest City area where most of the devastation took place…….
Just another crazy idea from yours truly or is it?…….
April 20th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
Off the top of my head, I can think of several reasons why this your idea not be practical. First, energetics. An ordinary thunderstorm releases the energy equivalent of a Nagasaki-sized atomic explosion (~20 kT). A supercell with a strong tornado will release several times that value. [For comparison, the energy released in a hurricane is several thousand times this, roughly equivalent to a 20 MT explosion every 20 minutes. The energy released by a typical hurricane over its lifetime would be sufficient to power the entire US electrical grid for AA arounda year.] What’s the energetic equivalent of an artillery shell, even a big one like a 155 mm? Pretty insignificant in comparison, I’d guess. AAA rounds are even wimpier.
I assume you’re talking about disrupting the tornado rather than the entire storm, so presumably less energy would be required. However, let’s say you break up the vortex in your draining bathtub (to save rubber ducky, no doubt). Often, it will quickly reform, because your actions have had no effect on the large-scale (pressure) field that sets up the vortex in the first place.
Finally, the physics of an explosion is not really conducive to modifying a fluid flow. Most of the energy of the arty explosion will be in the form of a shock wave that will be dissipated as heat as it propagates away from the explosion. I doubt the flow would be affected much once the shock has passed.
April 20th, 2005 at 4:03 pm
Note to self: proof-read.
April 21st, 2005 at 6:41 am
This is cool…. Thanx for all the info…. I was unaware of the actual forces involved….. And, yes, I was referring to disrupting the vortex itself, not the entire storm….. I can see, by your info, that the funnel would most likely reform, especially the larger F-4’s and 5’s, which would be the one’s we would want to destroy….. The largest artillery piece that would be mobile enough would be the 155 mm Howitzer…. What about multiple air-burst rounds fired in rapid succession with different powder loadings which would cause almost simultaneous detonations at various levels?…… It would still probably be like using a pea-shooter to knock down an elephant, right?….
No Luck for the Rubber Duck…..
Mother Nature can be a “Bad Mother” when she wants to be…..
April 21st, 2005 at 10:46 am
One trendy idea is to use space-borne high power microwave beams. Liquid water (rain and cloud drops) is highly absorptive to microwave radiation. Warming the upper part of the cloud would stabilize the atmosphere and kill off the storm, or so the advocates say. For practical purposes, this is currently still in the realm of sci-fi. Maybe Red Dwarf.
April 21st, 2005 at 1:47 pm
Well, let’s go ahead and take this around Pluto….. We use the arty idea and get Steve Green with his “Tornado Potato” (see Ride into an Oklahoma Tornado ) to take an FO (Forward Observer) with him to zero-in the artillery….. Since he intends to drive into the tornado anyway, he can also take a high power microwave generator of some kind along and fire it directly up into the vortex at the same time as the artillery barrage is laid in……
It may not work, but it would make a hell of a story……