Are there technologies available today that could be used to steer hurricanes or cyclones?

Question

I was reading a news article on CNN which dates back to 2012 regarding Hurricane Sandy which was the second-costliest hurricane in United States history. The article states:

Hours after Super-storm Sandy howled its way through the East Coast, unleashing a fatal trail of destruction, global reactions included outpouring of sympathy and support. In Syria however, pro-government supporters welcomed the super-storm, claiming the natural disaster is the result of high-tech secret Iranian engineering.

Source – http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/31/world/meast/syria-sandy-facebook-claim/

Pro-government group “News Network” of the Syrian Armed Forces stated on a Facebook posting:

“Sources confirmed to us that Hurricane Sandy that is slamming the U.S. was set off by highly advanced technologies developed by the heroic Iranian regime that supports the resistance, with coordination of our resistive Syrian regime,” “This is the punishment for whoever dares to attack Syria’s (Bashar) al-Assad and threaten peace and stability.”

Comments accompanying the post, which had more than 300 likes, ranged from derision to support.'

It makes me wonder, are there technologies available today that could be used to steer hurricanes or cyclones?

Answer 1

In theory? Yes, in reality? No. One could affect the course and strength of storm systems by pumping enough energy into the atmosphere. This could create blocking highs that push cyclonic systems onto new tracks, BUT the amount of energy you'd need to do so is staggering.

• You have to harvest that energy, we don't have that capability. We do have the technology just not the many square miles of satellite solar panels we'd need.

• You have to deliver it where you need it, that means a satellite network dedicated to moving energy around, we don't have one. We might be able to build one but there are serious practical engineering hurdles yet to be overcome. If you did have such a network moving the kind of energy we're talking about a simple retuning of the transfer beam would let you kill the whole US in an afternoon, sending a storm their way would be small potatoes.

• Then you need a projector that can send a tuned energy beam into the atmosphere that interacts with the air at a particular altitude without affecting air at higher and lower levels and without directly affecting the ground temperature, at all, we can't do that either. There were experiments with heating columns of air with microwaves during the cold war but that was from the ground up and as far as I know they stopped playing with it when they found they couldn't tune for altitude.

• And let's not forget for it to be an effective weapon you need to have built all that infrastructure without anyone noticing you were building and sending thousands of tonnes of payload modules into orbit every year.