Taking On A Hurricane

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

July 7, 2000 / 12:52 PM EDT / CBS

We've all heard of seeding clouds with pellets to produce moisture, but what about the reverse: seeding clouds with a powder to absorb the moisture in clouds?

CBS News Early Show Co-Anchor Russ Mitchell reports that's the idea being advanced by a Florida inventor who believes sucking moisture out of clouds could be the way to reduce the destructive force of hurricanes.

Peter Cordani isn't the inventor of the substance he wants to use on the clouds, a commonly-used garden product called Soil Moist, but Cordani's company, Dynomat, will be paying for experiments to test his theory.

Soil Moist, a powder of synthetic acrylic co-polymer crystals, has the capacity to absorb over 200 times its weight, according to its manufacturer, JRM Chemical. The chemical absorbs whatever water is present and then turns into a gel.

Products of this type have a wide variety of uses, including preventing soil erosion by absorbing excess moisture in the ground.

CBS
Scientist Hugh Willoughby
says some ideas on how to
stop hurricanes are " just
plain loony," but this one
merits a second look.

Gardeners use it in just the opposite way, to assure a steady supply of water regardless of rainfall. The crystals go in the ground near the root systems that need water, and then water is added to the crystals, which absorb, soften into a gel and then swell up with a large capacity of water which will then be absorbed gradually by the nearby plant roots.

Cordani's plan is to seed hurricane storm clouds with Soil Moist, which theoretically would absorb the fresh water in the clouds, turn into a gel, and then drop into the ocean, where the substance would be dissolved by the salt water.

The mixture is marketed as non-toxic, so Cordani doesn't believe its landing in the ocean would pose an environmental or biological hazard.

"We're trying to pull the strength out of the hurricane, so we feel if we absorb the moisture, we will do that," explains Cordani, who believes the hurricane's loss of moisture would cut down on its powerful punch and thus might save lives and property. His company is talking to scientists now about plans to test the product in conditions simulating a hurricane.

Cordani's neither a hurricane expert nor a scientist. So what gave him the big idea he's been chasing for some two years now?

"Actually, I was fooling around at my mom and dad's house, working with some Soil Moist and at the same time, I was putting my watercraft up. I had a rag and I picked it up and it had salt water on it," recalls Cordani. "The salt water ate the gel right off my hands."

Cordani isn't the first person to think he's come up with a way to cut hurricanes down to size. Federal governent hurricane researchers have heard a lot of "just plain loony" schemes over the years, but this particular idea is going to get a second look.

That's according to Hugh Willoughby, director of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Research Division. In an interview with CBS News, Willoughby says Cordani's proposal "has a chance."

"This man has hit upon something that's within the realm of physical possibility," says Willoughby, who points to a number of obstacles, even when it comes to testing out the theory. "There are a lot of considerations. There's a lot of science that has to be done before anybody can make a political decision, actually, and implement it."

What are some of the hazards? "The big potential problem is that it might just take more stuff than you can reasonably deliver into the eye of a hurricane," says Willoughby. "The envelope calculation that we've done tells us that it would take ten military heavy-lift aircraft dropping their loads in the eye of the storm, every hour. That's kind of the limit of what anybody would actually undertake."

Willoughby notes that with so many planes flying in the eye of a hurricane, there is a risk of mid-air collision. He says another concern is that an unforeseen flaw in the process being proposed could actually make the hurricane's impact even worse.

"The thing is that if you were to go ahead with it, make a decision to do it," explains Willoughby, "You would be talking about spending $1 million and spending ten or twenty years to get it to the point where you would be willing to try it with real people in front of the hurricane."

So it's on to the testing phase for Cordani, who plans to do computer simulations as well as actual physical experiments.

"There's a scientist out in Nevada who's probably one of the leading experts on what goes on in clouds and how clouds make rain. (Cordani's) going to send him a sample and he'll mess around with it and see what happens," says Willoughby. "At some point, somebody will probably drop a little bit of it into a fair weather cloud to see what will happen."

Bottom line, says Willoughby, "We don't know how this stuff will behave in a cloud."

But they're planning to find out.