by Tanada » Sat 18 Jul 2009, 09:14:26
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jbrovont', 'W')arm water is denser than cool water, thus the pumping to exchange them will expend energy. In order to exchange enough water to alter surface temperatures enough to remove the energy that drives a hurricane, you'd have to expend roughly the same amount of energy to overcome the difference in buoyancy...unless the atmospheric conditions were cool enough you didn't need to...in which case they wouldn't support a hurricane anyway.
How much oil would we have to burn to equal the energy released during Katrina anyway? Or is the idea to deploy nuclear powered ships to an explosive hot zone for treacherous seas?
Fault me if I'm wrong here, please. Otherwise this seems like a contender for a complete waste of time. Why not just stop building where hurricanes are apt to make landfall? Seems like that would be a lot cheaper.
Actually you have that backwards, cold water is denser that is why it sinks to the bottom and stays there on its own.
To get a large volume of water to rise and mix with the surface pumping the cold water up and then spraying it out as droplets to fall into and mix with the surface waters is only one method. The system I prefer is to trail a long flexible pipe behind the barge/ship/sub and pump air down to at least 400 foot depth and out through a bubble array. As the air rises in millions of tiny bubbles they lift and stir the water at the same time, this creates a column of rising cold water and much mixing all the way through the column.
I have also seen a scheme with a wave driven system of vertical pipes that are neutrally buoyant, the pipes are 500 feet long and have flotation cells near the top to keep them vertical. You put a set of one way valves inside the pipe, then as the waves lift it up and down the cold deep water is forced through the valves at the bottom on the down stroke. Each wave cycle results in another pipe width of cold water being forced into the bottom then upward on each wave cycle until it spills out of the open top of the pipe where it mixes with the warm surface waters. A few tens of thousands of those all driven by waves and you will create a cold patch on the surface without using artificial energy to do so.