Earth Sciences

Targeted artificial ocean cooling to weaken tropical cyclones would be futile

J. Hlywiak and D. S. Nolan

This study investigates innovative methods to cool sea surface temperatures and mitigate the impact of tropical cyclones before they reach land. Despite the potential for significant impact, findings indicate that even large-scale cooling may only achieve marginal weakening of storms just prior to landfall. This research was conducted by James Hlywiak and David S. Nolan.... show more

Abstract

Proposals to use technology to cool sea surface temperatures have received attention for the potential application of weakening a tropical cyclone ahead of landfall. Here, application of an ocean-mixing aware maximum potential intensity theory finds that artificial ocean cooling could drastically weaken tropical cyclones over high sea surface temperature and deep ocean mixed layer environments, especially for fast storm motion speeds. In contrast, realistic mesoscale numerical simulations reveal that massive regions – the largest evaluated here contains a volume of 2.1 × 10^4 km^3 and a surface area of 2.6 × 10^5 km^2 – of artificially cooled ocean waters could weaken a tropical cyclone two days before landfall by 15% but only under the most ideal atmospheric and oceanic conditions. Thus, the fundamental theory provides an unreachable upper-bound that cannot be attained even by expending vast resources.

Publisher

Communications Earth & Environment

Published On

Aug 19, 2022

Authors

James Hlywiak, David S. Nolan

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00519-1