Can Typhoons Be Destroyed with Nuclear Bombs? Why Can’t Humans Artificially Eliminate or Detonate Them?

What Would Happen if a Nuclear Bomb Were Dropped into a Typhoon’s Eye?

The most frequently asked question in the official scientific Q&A of the NOAA Hurricane Research Division is: "Why don't we use nuclear weapons to destroy hurricanes/typhoons?" Scientists calculated the energy balance:

• Typhoons are energy behemoths on Earth:
• The latent heat released by water vapor condensing inside a mature typhoon has a power output as high as $6.0 \times 10^{14}$ watts (60 trillion watts)—equivalent to 200 times the total generating capacity of every power plant on Earth, or detonating a 10-megaton hydrogen bomb every 20 minutes!
• By comparison, the shock wave produced by a nuclear explosion would be like blowing at a high-speed train when directed at a typhoon’s circulation, which can span thousands of kilometers. It cannot even disperse the eyewall for a few minutes.
• Even more terrifying consequences: creating a "nuclear-radiation typhoon":
• The eyewall contains extremely violent updrafts. The enormous amount of radioactive dust produced by a nuclear explosion would be rapidly drawn into the spiraling rainbands tens of thousands of feet high and then precisely scattered across thousands of square kilometers of land and ocean by the typhoon’s torrential rain and violent winds, turning a meteorological disaster into a devastating ecological nuclear catastrophe.

Could the Silver Iodide Used for Artificial Rainfall Weaken a Typhoon?

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the U.S. government spent tens of millions of dollars on the famous Project Stormfury: aircraft penetrated the area just outside the hurricane’s eyewall and seeded it with silver iodide in an attempt to induce the outer cloud system to condense prematurely, creating a new, larger eye to disperse the original eyewall’s wind speeds.

• Why did the project ultimately fail? Scientists later discovered that typhoons naturally undergo frequent eyewall replacement cycles (EWRC). The observed weakening in wind speed back then was simply the result of the typhoon replacing its own eyewall and had nothing to do with the several hundred kilograms of silver iodide that had been seeded.

What Would Happen if Typhoons Really Disappeared?

Although typhoons cause disasters, they are an indispensable "safety valve" in Earth’s atmospheric heat balance:

• Tropical oceans continuously receive intense solar radiation. Without typhoons transporting the massive accumulated heat and moisture from the equator and subtropics to the middle and high latitudes, tropical oceans would become unbearably hot, while the high latitudes would become even colder;
• For southern China and the Jiangnan region, 30%–50% of reservoir water storage during the midsummer drought is replenished by typhoon rainfall. Without typhoons, widespread severe droughts would instead occur.