Just north of northern South Sudan in southern Sudan, west of Eritrea, east of Chad, over the Nile River, a thunderstorm formed. This was not unusual in the hot summer months, but the storm did not stick around. It fled west. Passing over the lions and elephants native to Zakouma National Park, the storm stirred up massive dust clouds in its wake. Onward it moved through Nigeria, its outer bands brushing the capital city of Abuja. From there, it moved inexorably toward the coast, passing over Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, and Liberia, just catching the corner of Sierra Leone before progressing over the Atlantic Ocean. And now you likely know more about Africa than any white person you might run into at a party tonight.
Look, this is science. There’s no way around it. Still, science and scientists are as susceptible to the occasional tangent into poop jokes as anyone, so let’s see if we can’t spice this science lesson up by sexualizing the entire process of hurricane development.
After leaving Sierra Leone behind, the thunderstorm poked out from the coast of Africa into the incredibly warm, moist environment of the Atlantic Ocean. The water temperature was over 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Combined with the powerful winds, the ocean was whipped into a veritable Love Island jacuzzi. This was as it needed to be, for no self-respecting hurricane could possibly expand to its full size in a less welcoming environment. Heat is the engine that drives the storm and near the equator is where that hot steamy environment is found. It was sooo hot.
In fact, it was so hot that the air right above the water rose toward the clouds above, thrusting upwards to penetrate the wispy layers of resistance, spilling across them, then cooling quickly and thickening into convective genera, if you know what I mean, which you do not, so imagine the most juvenile interpretation. Meanwhile, back at the base of the storm, cooler air swept in to fill the void the warm air left behind and that process repeated in a steady building rhythmic fashion with hot air repeatedly thrusting upwards and cooler air swirling around the base of the storm aided by the rotation of the earth, a veritable swirly, adding just enough additional friction to push things over the edge.
The result of all this warmth, moisture, thrusting, and spinning was a tropical cyclone constantly fed by warm ocean water and cooling cloud tops that started spinning around an increasingly defined center where warm air continued to flow upward with the stamina of a grandpa hopped up on blue pills.
They would eventually call the storm Delilah. She still was 4,000 miles away from Florida and she was brewing a windy, wet, moist cauldron of trouble.
And the reason Sarah’s sci-fi writers were having to concoct outrageous scenarios for manipulating a hurricane is because they are massive and the energy they generate is not something that is going to be affected by a big fan, a big bomb, or a strongly worded letter. The closest anyone came to impacting the strength of a hurricane was a U.S. government project in the 1960s called Stormfury. Military scientists dumped silver iodide into the clouds near the eye of a hurricane in the hope that the chemical reaction would cause water vapor to freeze disrupting the heat transfer from the warm ocean water. Results were inconclusive, which given what had happened fifteen years earlier was a step in the right direction.
Project Cirrus was conceived right after WWII. In what sounds like a frat party idea gone wrong, the Department of Defense and General Electric commandeered a couple Bombers and dumped 180 pounds of dry ice into a hurricane off the Atlantic coast in hopes of weakening the storm or creating an epic kegger—either would have been deemed a success. Unfortunately, the dry ice gambit was a scientific bust, but demonstrated a tremendous knack for poor timing, as shortly after the experiment concluded, a blocking high pressure system turned the storm west, right over Savannah, Georgia. In an entirely predictable development, the damage to person and property in Savannah was blamed on 180 pounds of dry ice and lawsuits did what scientific skepticism could not and shut down the project.
Look, the average hurricane generates the equivalent of about two hundred times the total electrical generating capacity of the entire planet. One hurricane has the equivalent destructive force of 10,000 nuclear bombs over the course of its existence. You don’t just shove these things around, even if your brother the Supreme Leader Anointed By God etc. wants you to. So, you gotta come up with another plan.
The End of Part One
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