So why can't we dissipate Tornado's

[Rakehellion]

Bet the insurance companies would rather pay for that, than a few damaged homes.

I think the insurance companies can absorb the cost of a few lost trailer homes.

 

[John Connor]

Just control particle movement....

 

[MrDudeMan]

Well, just a quick back of the envelope calculation:

According to the internet, the average rotational energy in a tornado is 10,000 killowatt hours. This corresponds to about 3.6E10 Joules.

Now, find a bomb with the equivalent energy: 3.6E10 Joules is about 86 tons of tnt from the joule to kiloton conversion. From wiki, the most likely explosive would be ANFO, but 100 tonnes of the stuff is quite a lot...

That at least would put you in the right ballpark to dissipate a tornado.

why are you assuming you have to impart the same amount of energy into the center as the rotational energy inherent to the twister? i can stop a car with very little force because of the mechanics of how a car works. without knowing more about how tornadoes are sustained, it's not easy to guess how much energy it would take to cause one to dissipate. for all i know, it could take a well-placed ice cube, but maybe you know more than your post implied. i'd like to know if anyone has figured this out.

 

[DrPizza]

why are you assuming you have to impart the same amount of energy into the center as the rotational energy inherent to the twister? i can stop a car with very little force because of the mechanics of how a car works. without knowing more about how tornadoes are sustained, it's not easy to guess how much energy it would take to cause one to dissipate. for all i know, it could take a well-placed ice cube, but maybe you know more than your post implied. i'd like to know if anyone has figured this out.

Just because your force on the brake pedal is tiny, that doesn't mean that large forces aren't in play to stop your vehicle. To understand why I find your claim silly, the President pushes a button with his little finger - a missile launches and delivers a nuclear bomb. We wouldn't say that it was a tiny force because of his pinky.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Just because your force on the brake pedal is tiny, that doesn't mean that large forces aren't in play to stop your vehicle. To understand why I find your claim silly, the President pushes a button with his little finger - a missile launches and delivers a nuclear bomb. We wouldn't say that it was a tiny force because of his pinky.

it's not relevant if you find my analogy silly because you missed the point in your first sentence. a small force in one location, through a system of increasingly powerful interactions, can exert a much larger force on something else. the point of the analogy wasn't to directly compare a mechanical system with a tornado; the point was to elicit a more academic justification for why the rotational energy is relevant. if you want to brute force the tornado's dissipation, maybe it's relevant, but there are likely different, less powerful ways to make it stop by applying science instead of muscle.

as an aside, we could say the president exerted a tiny force and a huge reaction happened as a result because that's how the system works. a blackbox model would show that quite well: small energy input through a finger press -> huge energy output through a nuclear reaction. it's more complex than what i had in mind, but, conceptually, the point is still similar and it's approximately what i was suggesting originally. while you were busy focusing on one part of my post, you didn't discuss any of the potential feedback mechanisms or possible sources of energy amplification, so to speak, that could exist in a tornado's system.

i spent around an hour googling how tornadoes dissipate and i couldn't find any articles that explained exactly how it happens. the same ideas are repeated on most sites, but they seem to all end with something like this (i'm paraphrasing): "it's complex and we know x, y, and z are related to the eventual dissipation, but a lot of stuff isn't known yet."

this isn't about fingers, nukes, or brake pedals; it's about how tornados could potentially be dissipated by humans at will through some other means than matching a huge amount of rotational energy output.

 

[A5]

Well, it's also about doing it in a way that is energy/cost efficient, portable, and causes less destruction than just letting the tornado happen.

You're also starting from an assumption that there *exists* a human-scale mechanism in the formation/dissipation of a high-energy natural phenomenon. I have a hard time attempting to even answer the prompt because I am not aware of any research pointing to such a thing, and I do not believe you will find one.

If you are able to find one, you would probably win a Nobel Prize, or at least a gigantic government grant to do more research into it.

 

[MrDudeMan]

Well, it's also about doing it in a way that is energy/cost efficient, portable, and causes less destruction than just letting the tornado happen.

that's literally my entire point.

You're also starting from an assumption that there *exists* a human-scale mechanism in the formation/dissipation of a high-energy natural phenomenon. I have a hard time attempting to even answer the prompt because I am not aware of any research pointing to such a thing, and I do not believe you will find one.

i'm not assuming anything. i have no idea if such a thing exists and i wasn't able to find any evidence suggesting that it does. i was responding to the assertion that we would have to match the rotational energy, which was completely unsubstantiated. maybe it's true, but there should be more information than simply saying it's true. if it's not true, which i suspect it isn't, it's a more interesting discussion to have than 'drop a nuke in it.'

 

[Joepublic2]

It would also probably be hard to find willing volunteers to drive a truck loaded up with tons and tons of HE into said tornado. You could definitely find thrill seekers beforehand willing to do the deed, but then the problem becomes how do you get them to said tornado in time to make a difference?