


President Trump wasn't isn't the only one.

As Tropical Storm Dorian strengthens across the Caribbean,the president reportedly asked top national security officials whether the United States could nuke a hurricane to stop it, according to an Axios report.

“Needless to say, this is not a good idea," Chris Landsea of  the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in a post on NOAA's website.

Hurricanes are so powerful — the average hurricane’s wind energy equals about half of the world’s electricity production in a year — that even several nuclear weapons would barely alter a storm, according to NOAA. There could also be a radioactive fallout.

Trump denied asking the question it in a tweet posted early Monday.

The idea of nuking a hurricane has come up before, so often, that NOAA has an entire web page dedicated to debunking the nuclear proposal.  

Whether he said it or not, nuking hurricanes is not the only idea that's been tossed around to stop a hurricane. Here are some other ideas — some more outlandish than others — that have been shared through the years.

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Cloud seeding

Vox recently reported on some ideas on how to thwart off hurricanes. The idea of growing ice in the eye of a hurricane to make the eye grow wider and collapse the storm was proposed in 1947 by Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir. This idea was studied until 1983. But the conclusion according to NOAA, was that cloud seeding had little prospect of success. 

Cooling the seas with a giant tube

Ocean temperatures have a lot to do with hurricanes. The magic number for hurricane formation is 79.7 degrees. The Salter, invented by a professor in Scotland, is a wave-powered pump that would move warm surface water down to the depths. The idea is that hundreds of thousands of these devices in hurricane-prone regions of the world would cool waters enough to make a measurable reduction in the strength of storms.

Brightening clouds

Professor Salter’s other tactic for fighting hurricanes is making clouds a tiny bit brighter using aerosols, harnessing a phenomenon called the Twomey effect. The increased sunlight reflection in the sky would keep the waters below from warming up to the hurricane threshold, while also curbing evaporation, reducing the atmospheric moisture needed to make a storm. Salter envisions unmanned boats spraying sub-micron-size water droplets into the sky, seeding shinier clouds in areas forecast to spawn storms.


Dyn-O-Gel is a special powder produced by Dyn-O-Mat, a company based out of Jupiter, Florida. The gel is designed to absorb large amounts of moisture after which it becomes a gel. An experiment did see the gel dissipate cumulus clouds in Florida but for the average hurricane, you would need 37,700 tons of gel, according to FLORIDA TODAY. That would be problematic considering that a heavy-lift transport airplane can only transport about 100 tons.

Sonic booms

Popular Science reported about flying supersonic jets into a hurricane. In a nutshell, you would fly supersonic jets in concentric circles around the eye of the hurricane. The jets would generate a sonic boom that would disrupt the upward flow of warm air that creates the hurricane.

Lasers and microwaves?



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