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 × 10⁴ km³) 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.

James Hlywiak, David S. Nolan