Proposals to use technology to cool sea surface temperatures to weaken tropical cyclones before landfall are examined. Applying ocean-mixing aware maximum potential intensity theory suggests artificial cooling could drastically weaken cyclones in high sea surface temperature and deep ocean mixed layer environments, especially for fast-moving storms. However, realistic mesoscale numerical simulations show that even massive artificially cooled ocean regions (up to 2.1 × 10<sup>4</sup> km<sup>3</sup>) only weaken a cyclone by 15% two days before landfall, and only under the most ideal conditions. This indicates that the theoretical upper bound is unreachable, even with vast resources.
Publisher
Communications Earth & Environment
Published On
Aug 19, 2022
Authors
James Hlywiak, David S. Nolan
Tags
tropical cyclones
sea surface temperature
ocean cooling
storm weakening
numerical simulations
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