Environment, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

SCIENCE-LATAM: Bring Out the Anti-Hurricane Artillery

Diego Cevallos* - Tierramérica

MEXICO CITY, Sep 21 2004 (IPS) - To date, all of the weapons that meteorologists and scientists have come up with to debilitate tropical cyclones have failed. But research into ways to fight hurricanes continues, and in five years there could be some important breakthroughs, say experts.

The power of a hurricane can be the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes, and several – Frances, Ivan and most recently Jeanne – have been thrashing the tropical regions of the Americas. Flooding caused by tropical storm Jeanne, which has veered north, caused a death toll in Haiti that had risen to nearly 600 by Tuesday.

Potential weapons against this natural phenomenon include the use of a special liquid that prevents evaporation of seawater that feeds the giant storms, the release of ash into the storm, and seeding of the storm with silver iodide as an accelerant – the latter is the only procedure that has been put to the test.

”There is scepticism about the possibility of effectively controlling the cyclones, but in five years we might know if it is a well-founded scepticism or not,” hurricane expert Ricardo Prieto, of the Mexican Institute of Water Technology.

In theory and in laboratory experiments, scientists are working with ”the micro-physics of clouds,” a field that could produce important clues about the manipulation of cyclones before 2010, Prieto said.

While those studies continue in Mexico, the U.S. government is conducting others, which include observations and measurements of the storms in situ, using aircraft and satellites in an attempt to determine how hurricanes behave.

Thanks to scientific advances, in the past 30 years there was a great leap in tropical storm research, which made precise alerts possible about when and where they are formed. However, so far there is no way to manipulate the strength or direction that the storms or hurricanes take.

Tropical storms and their more intense cousins, known in the Americas as hurricanes, and in other parts of the world as ‘baguio’, typhoons or ‘Willy-willy’, begin to form when the ocean temperatures in the latitudes near the tropics increase, as occurs in the Western Hemisphere between May and November.

Converging in the cyclone are winds and clouds of different temperatures that spin at a high speed due to the rotation of the Earth. The ever-changing patterns of movement cause strong gusts of wind and storms with enormous destructive power.

In the 1960s, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tried to weaken the cyclones by using aircraft to ”seed” the clouds with silver iodide, to cause condensation inside the storm, accelerating its life cycle and decline. The normal life cycle of this meteorological phenomenon can reach two weeks.

The plan, known as Project Stormfury, was tried on Hurricane Beulah in 1963 and on Debbie in 1969, but the results were disappointing.

Another attempt at neutralising these storms – currently only in the experimental phase – focuses on disseminating a liquid into the storm that would prevent the evaporation of ocean water where the cyclones form. But this has also failed so far.

In the 1970s the idea emerged to release billions of ash particles, created from the burning of petroleum, along the edges of the cyclone to absorb the solar radiation and generate heat, which, it was hoped, would deactivate the power of the storm. This theory has not yet been tested outside the laboratory.

”As long as there is not some sort of weapon against hurricanes, all we can do is continue to coexist with them in an era in which their frequency seems to be increasing, because already the Caribbean is above the yearly average,” Ricardo Sánchez, director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), told Tierramérica.

Some scientists think this year’s spate of storms is due to global warming, a phenomenon attributed to the burning of fossil fuels and their release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But there is no consensus about the possible link between global warming and the increased number of hurricanes this season.

According to Sánchez, for now what the countries of Central America and the Caribbean should do – as they are most affected by hurricanes – is work to reduce their vulnerability to the storms’ destructive force. They are particularly at risk because of the degradation of soils, deforestation, unregulated urbanisation and widespread poverty.

With a deteriorated environment and millions of people living in precarious settlements, natural phenomena multiply their destructive capacity, as occurred in 1998 with Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people and left material damage worth more than six billion dollars in its wake.

>From 1970 to 2001, natural disasters caused 246,569 deaths in Latin America and the Caribbean and directly affected another 144 million people. In that period material losses reached 68.6 billion dollars.

Shaken by these tragedies, in the past few years the region has made strides in improving civil defence against natural disasters, facilitating faster evacuations and reaching the people affected more quickly.

Cuba was able to evacuate some two million people last week to protect them from Hurricane Ivan, one of the six most powerful storms since 1974. Mexico, Jamaica and other countries carried out similar efforts, but Ivan’s destructive force was such that the death toll surpassed 60.

Given the relatively tiny economies of the Caribbean and Central America, hurricanes as big as Ivan cause enormous losses.

The small island nation of Grenada, for example, home to just over 100,000 inhabitants, saw nearly 90 percent of its buildings destroyed, and the response capacity of the government and other organisations was more than overwhelmed.

According to experts, Hurricane Mitch’s passage through Central America in 1998 set back the region’s economic development by at least a decade.

UNEP’s Sánchez says the international community should set up ”a global stabilisation fund” to help countries that are hit by natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes, drought or flooding.

However, he added, ”the region itself must invest more in prevention and in restoring the deteriorated environment.”

Of the disaster-related loans and donations that reach Latin America and the Caribbean, 90 percent goes towards assistance and reconstruction efforts, and just 10 percent for prevention.

(* Diego Cevallos is an IPS correspondent. Originally published Sep. 18 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)