Steering a hurricane. Interesting idea. Here’s how it went.
I had been made aware of hurricane Charley a few days ago. I knew something was coming, but hadn’t really looked at it. When I saw the news Wednesday night, they were predicting it to go through Tampa, Orlando, and then here in Jacksonville. This was not a pleasant idea. I had classes scheduled for Friday and Saturday (today). Because of the storm, I had two cancellations from class yesterday, and then postponed the class for today.
The predicted track of the storm had it hitting Orlando sometime last night and then being here early morning today. I had been thinking about what could be done to try to steer it away. It really looked like a no win situation. No matter where it went, it would strike land. The only good solution would have been for it to burn out while in the Gulf, but that wouldn’t happen. Storms get bigger over water.
I know that it is possible to move weather around, steer storms away, or pull them in. I have a friend that does this all the time. I have done it a few times, and been fairly successful. But this was where I was blocking an area to keep rain away until I finished certain tasks. I’ve never done anything with something the size of a hurricane. It was at that time, that I got a call from my friend in South Carolina. Her brother was in Tampa, being 19 and afraid of nothing. She asked help in steering the storm away from Tampa. She figured that if it hit north at Alabama it would be better as people there are used to dealing with hurricanes, and know what to do. In Tampa, they really didn’t know.
I didn’t like the idea of aiming it at anyone, but agreed to try to steer it from Tampa. As we talked, we created a wall along the entire west coast of Florida. I thought I was actually getting clever. I set the properties on the wall so it got most of its strength from the storm. I figured, the stronger the storm, the stronger the wall. (I’ll have to revisit this concept some day.)
Then I did something else, I put out a series of separate walls just south of Tampa. I made them edge on toward the storm with a lot of them at different levels. The idea was to see if I could get the walls to break up the storm when it hit. If not, I figured that the storm was turning clockwise (looking down at it from space), and that maybe it would go west when it hit these walls. It was worth a shot.
Later in the day, during the class, we strengthened these walls. We put everything into pushing the storm away. A while after that, my wife called to let me know that the storm had turned inland and was making for Orlando.
I didn’t know until I got home where the storm had turned. According to the person at the Weather Channel, there must have been some disturbance in the Gulf to make the storm turn suddenly inland. As I looked at the map on TV, my jaw dropped to the floor. You see, when I had created these separate walls, I had visualized a place on the map just below Tampa, even though I didn’t have a map with me. When I saw the place on the map on TV showing where the storm had turned, I was flabbergasted. You see, there was a disturbance that made the storm turn… the walls we had put up. The problem was (as I learned at that moment) that storms turn counterclockwise. That is why it kicked east and not west. Ouch. (Note for future reference: Hurricanes turn counterclockwise.)
Once it kicked, the wall up the coast didn’t stand a chance. The storm just went right through it. After that, it went over Orlando as it had been predicted before, but instead of heading here, it went off the coast at Daytona. I knew that once it went off the coast, there would be no chance of it coming here, no matter that the people at the weather channel said.
Several years ago, my teacher, Kay, lived at a house on the beach in St. Augustine. Someone made a wooden pyramid that was exact in scale as one of the great pyramids in Egypt. They set it facing east as a storm blocker. (The only storm to hit Jacksonville in recent years was in 1993. That storm came from the Gulf as Charley had done.) The pyramid blocks storms coming from the east. A number of years after Kay moved to a different house, and the one she had lived in was getting sold, she had Barb and I get the pyramid and move it to Barb’s farm. It sits there today facing east as it did before. I knew that once the storm went off the coast, it would not return in Florida no matter what the weather person said.
As it was, the storm passed Jacksonville between 2:00 and 4:00 this morning. The highest winds we got were maybe 40mph. We got off easy.
I wasn’t happy at messing up the direction of the storm, or at least the direction I had intended. But in the long run, if you look at it, this was probably the better path it could have taken, rather than taking the initially predicted path. The original path would have sent this category four hurricane to ground in Tampa. Then it would have gone through Orlando, and then Jacksonville. If it had gone through Tampa, there would have been much more loss as Tampa is much more built up than the areas that it hit. Orlando would have gotten hit one way or another. Daytona got hit, but not as bad as it could have been. Jacksonville and the surrounding areas were spared.
One can’t argue that death and destruction is not a laughing matter. And we can’t say that this hurricane would not have done damage no matter where it went. So all in all, I guess that the path it took was probably the least destructive of any of those that it could have. So, if any of us took any part in making that happen, I guess we should be pleased to some extent. It wasn’t the best possible scenario (the storm fizzling out to nothing in the Gulf), but I guess it was the best out of all the realistic possibilities.
Now we have to work on stopping one in its tracks, and turning it back into nothing.
Just for the Record...
This article was to end at the line that talks about turning a storm into nothing. As I was searching the web, I came across an article which I have copied the relevant portions here. The article came from the NewScientist.com web site.
Hurricane Charley's sharp turn baffles scientists
15:48 16 August 04
NewScientist.com news service
A last-minute swerve to the right by Hurricane Charley which devastated the coastal Florida town of Punta Gorda over the weekend, has baffled experts. The 258 km/hour hurricane that flattened the US town on Friday afternoon, killing at least 20 people and injuring many others, was predicted to hit land 70 miles further north, but changed direction within minutes of the coast.
“There was a sudden intensification and a veering to the right of track, and we’re all trying to work out why,” said Mark Saunders, a tropical storm expert from Benfield Hazard Centre at University College London, UK.
(The full article is no longer available)